Writers' Block

For all that, Voisey too has had to earn a living. "I've been a bookkeeper, a customer service rep, a telemarketer, an integration manager for a computer company," he says. "I haven't driven a cab yet" -- an allusion to one of the jobs Philip Glass held before he made it big. "Now I'm a financial comptroller for a labor union. I do that part time. But composing keeps me sane."

Learning to compete

THERE are, of course, less unorthodox ways for composers to get noticed. Among those who have taken a more traditional approach is Andrew Norman, 27, a 2004 USC graduate who won the prestigious American Academy Rome Prize last year.

"One of the best ways to get my work out there is through entering it in various competitions," Norman says. "Even if you don't win, people might hear it. Several opportunities came my way just by people hearing things."

One of those listeners was Steven Stucky, the L.A. Philharmonic's consulting composer for new music, who programmed Norman's "Gran Turismo" on a Monday Evening Concerts performance in February. "This is a guy clearly at the beginning of a big career," says Stucky. "This is the kind of person we have our eye on."

"All of his music appeals to me because it makes such original connections either to visual phenomena or to architecture or to thinking about design in some way," Stucky adds. "At one kind of simple level, this piece seems like a quasi-Minimalist, supercharged, drug-addled Vivaldi -- eight violinists sawing away. It's immediately visceral and exciting and like being behind a race car. It's a white-knuckle kind of music. But in the end, its appeal is in the big design that it has, which it carries out fearlessly and unsentimentally. It's music that's tough-minded."

Still, even with his Rome Prize and more than a year's worth of commissions ahead of him, Norman has a few concerns. "I could spend as much energy and time promoting my music and getting it out there as in the actual side of creating the works," he says. "It's very difficult to find that balance.

"As a young composer, I'm still dealing with how to expand my own music and find my own voice while writing pieces to other people's specifications. Composers should be versatile, but sometimes I feel that people commissioned me based on what they've heard and they might expect me to write the same thing for them. It's a challenge to go in a different direction when money gets involved."