Gates, another prize-winning composer, has several commissions lined up, including one for a string quartet that came about through a friend. He regards such connections as critical.
"It's simply not enough to write good music," he says. "A composer has to create a strong network of people who want to work with him or her. I write the music I want to hear, to be sure, but I also try to put myself in the performer's head as I compose."
Juhi Bansal, 22, who's at work on a master's at USC, feels the same. "The more contacts you have with performers and the more they hear and like your music, the more it gets played," she says.
Otherwise, advice on how to build a career has been spotty. "I've had teachers who didn't even touch on how to make a living," she says. "Others have been more helpful, urging us to participate in as many music festivals as possible, do things over the summer or enter competitions."
Like Norman's, Bansal's strategy has been to focus on competitions. Last year, she won an ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composers Award.
"There is a monetary award to it, which isn't too much," she says. (It's $750.) "They expect you to fly to New York for the ceremony, which eats up most of it. Still, it's incredibly helpful as a career thing. Being able to put something like that on your resume, because it's such a big competition, people definitely look at your work twice."
For Bansal and her peers, the hardest thing is that "so many people, particularly so many performers, are so caught up in old music and classical repertory they're not even interested in looking at things that are new," she says. "That definitely causes problems. All of us want to work as composers, but pretty much everybody will be teaching privately or working other jobs like being a copyist. Everybody has something lined up as a fallback."
Breaks and fallbacks
EVEN Harold Meltzer -- one of the few lucky enough to have emerged from that stack of scores on Chad Smith's desk at the Philharmonic -- has a fallback.
Meltzer's "Virginal," a concerto for harpsichord and 15 other instruments, was played at a Philharmonic Green Umbrella Concert in 2004. That led to a Philharmonic New Music Group commission: a piano concerto, "Privacy," composed for Ursula Oppens and scheduled to be premiered in March.
