"That was the biggest break I've had," says Meltzer, 41. "At the time, I was on a Guggenheim Fellowship. A couple of months later, I won the Rome Prize. I was winning lots of awards but not getting many performances, which was puzzling. The L.A. thing happened, in a sense, out of nowhere."
Says Stucky: "It really has happened occasionally that we discovered somebody in the mailbag. 'Virginal' was a piece that charmed us, and we put it on a program on the spot. It was the beginning of a relationship that led to commissioning a piece."
Meltzer, who has other commissions pending, also came to composing late, after working as a lawyer in New York. "I didn't come out of the gate of grad school and have a career," he says. "I went to grad school at 28. All sorts of things are set up to help young composers 25, 26. Already, I wasn't in that kind of 'golden boy' mode. Really, my first breaks came from senior composers like Steve Stucky who were not my teachers. These people seemingly all at once, five or six years ago, took a liking to me. I found them very helpful."
His career sums up everyone's so far: Be prepared to go the distance, but in your own way. "It doesn't seem consoling to tell people to persevere, to have faith in their work," he says. "But there is no other way."
Meltzer now teaches part time at Vassar College and, like McBane, has his own ensemble, Sequitur, which he set up to play his music but which now performs a wider range of works.
"I feel pretty comfortable now," he says. "My income is evenly divided between teaching and composing. It's not a huge income. I have the option of teaching more than I do. And if I flop, I can practice law."
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chris.pasles@latimes.com
