Composers

Spring is, as always, a season for festivals. The big one in Los Angeles this year is the ongoing celebration of the centenary of Benjamin Britten's birth, initiated by Los Angeles Opera. The Los Angeles Philharmonic's weeklong Brooklyn Festival in April is an investigation into how the New York City borough has become a hot spot for young composers. But while festivals take up a lot of the oxygen on the performing arts calendars, there is much else: Christian Wolff As a teen in the early 1950s, Wolff was taken under John Cage's wing and soon became a prominent member of Cage's New York School.

Vincent G. Dowling Actor, director gave Tom Hanks early break Actor and director Vincent G. Dowling, 83, who left behind a long career with Ireland's national theater to run a Shakespeare festival in Cleveland where he gave a young Tom Hanks an early break as an actor, died May 10 at a Boston hospital. The cause was complications from surgery, said his wife, Olwen. At 16, Dowling left school in his native Dublin to become an actor and in 1953 joined the Abbey Theatre, Ireland's national theater company.

Little did Antonio Romero Monge realize when he saw a sexy dancer at a party in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1993 that he'd just stumbled across the inspiration for a song so irresistible that it would eventually have the world dancing and be included among David Letterman's top 10 ways for President Clinton to sabotage the Republican National Convention. ("Replace Dole's acceptance speech with lyrics to 'Macarena.' ") "Macarena," which celebrates its 52nd week on the U.S.

Eleven minutes and 22 seconds of what was once expected to be a major half-hour string quartet is not, quite yet, a comeback. But a little more than 11 minutes of very good music by a wonderful composer, loved by audiences and performers alike and simply one of the great musical forces of our time, is a start. What's to be done about Osvaldo Golijov other than wait? Probably nothing. His "Qohelet," which the St. Lawrence String Quartet played at Irvine Barclay Theatre on Sunday afternoon, had its first performance at Stanford University in 2011.

Some implements of the art, from left, top: A non-reproducible pencil whose marks won't be picked up on a photocopy, a cassette player with earphones for travel, an ordinary pencil, a dip pen, a raised ruler with cork, a trinome or three-speed metronome, a miniature composition book and a letter opener. Not pictured is an electric eraser that Harbison says all composers have and use constantly for taking out such things as a single notehead.

Composers, look to your laurels: A mere computer program can transform a racket of clangs, hums and beeps into a pleasing melody, and all humans have to do is offer feedback with the click of a mouse. The program, by a British bioinformatics expert whose day job involves tackling biomedical problems, employs the same principles of natural selection that guide the evolution of living beings over many generations. The software - dubbed DarwinTunes, of course - creates 8-second collections of notes and puts them through the evolutionary wringer.

Lalo Schifrin describes himself simply as a "music maker. " "I do music by taking a baton and conducting it or by writing it or by playing the piano," said the 78-year-old composer, who perhaps is best known for his Grammy-winning, jazz infused score for the classic TV series "Mission: Impossible. " But Schifrin is being unduly modest. The Argentine-born composer helped change the sound of movie scores, earning six Oscar nominations. Among his movie scores are 1965's "The Cincinnati Kid," 1967's "Cool Hand Luke," for which he earned his first Oscar nomination, 1968's "Bullitt," 1971's "THX 1138 and "Dirty Harry," 1979's "The Amityville Horror," for which he was also Oscar-nominated and the three "Rush Hour" comedies.

It wasn't B.J. Thomas, exactly, but musical raindrops seemed to be falling in a white-walled rehearsal room next to Walt Disney Concert Hall, courtesy of Milo Talwani, one of the L.A. composers least likely to write melody, let alone ear candy, into a piece of music. At 16, he's one of four area high school students taking the royal road to composing careers, at least at the outset, via the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Talwani, a lanky epitome of precocious Bohemian-intellectual cool who's a junior at the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts, had placed pizzicato plinking sounds that evoked the first spatterings of a cloudburst into a musical fragment from a work in progress.

John WILLIAMS and Christian Wolff are both composers. They are Americans (although Wolff was born in Nice, France). They are of the same generation (Williams turned 72 in February; Wolff, 70 in March). And they are both about to receive honorary doctorates.

Not every composer today is scared off by modern technology. Members of the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music, for instance, are dedicated to it. In their works, these composers bring together everyday orchestral instruments and sophisticated electronic gadgetry. "The technology gives new meaning and possibilities to classical music," says composer Andrew Rodell, coordinator for a concert by seven members of the Los Angeles chapter of the society at 8 tonight at Chapman College in Orange.

Drawn to imaginative ideas about sound and pitch, musician and composer Dean Drummond found the traditional instruments of European classical music inadequate to perform the seemingly "out of tune" intervals of microtonal music. So he followed the lead of his mentor - iconoclastic American composer Harry Partch - and invented instruments that would produce a complete palette of tonal pitches. The music makers were known by such fittingly unconventional names as the zoomoozophone and juststrokerods.

There is little mistaking California's 22nd largest city for Brooklyn, N.Y., to say nothing of the literally lifeless Glendale section of western Queens, adjacent to Brooklyn. Unlike New York City's Glendale, ours has, despite accommodating Forest Lawn, more living than dead (Glendale in Queens is home to many cemeteries). But despite its vitality, our Glendale hardly has a Brooklyn hipster vibe (although its Armenian restaurants may attract the occasional nearby Atwater Village artist)

Times have certainly changed in Brooklyn. Streets unsafe last decade now bustle invitingly. Composers born in the borough last century couldn't get away fast enough. Composers from all over now can't move there fast enough. Thursday night at Walt Disney Concert Hall the Los Angeles Philharmonic continued its Brooklyn Festival with three recent or new orchestra pieces by young Brooklyn residents all born in the early 1980s elsewhere. The fourth and final work on the program was by a 24-year-old just returned from studying in Paris and happily ensconced on the Upper West Side, intentionally putting as much New York City distance between himself and his native Brooklyn as was reasonable.

A tree grows most surely in Brooklyn. But what's in a ZIP Code? The Los Angeles Philharmonic began its Brooklyn Festival on Tuesday night with a Green Umbrella concert at Walt Disney Concert Hall. The hip New York City borough is not just a destination for visual artists, artisan picklers and other assorted foodies, but also host to a significant new music scene. Meanwhile, Hear Now held its third annual Festival of Contemporary Los Angeles Music in Venice - where foodies (along with artisan picklers)

Large classical music ensembles are no strangers to economic challenges, but the Santa Monica-based Verdi Chorus may be the only one whose existential crisis came when an Italian restaurant went out of business. The opera-only ensemble of about 50 voices has lived to tell the tale, and this weekend, it will celebrate its 30th anniversary while also honoring the 200th anniversary of the birth of Giuseppe Verdi, the great composer after whom it is only tangentially named. The chorus began in 1983 as a house organ of Verdi Ristorante di Musica, a fancily redone former Wilshire Boulevard funeral parlor where singing was as much a fixture as veal scaloppine.

Composer Caroline Shaw has won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for music for her a cappella composition "Partita for 8 Voices. " The two finalists in the category this year were Aaron Jay Kernis for "Pieces of Winter Sky" and Wadada Leo Smith for "Ten Freedom Summers. " "Partita for 8 Voices" was released in October by New Amsterdam Records, featuring the vocal group Roomful of Teeth. On her website, Shaw states that the 26-minute piece was inspired by Sol LeWitt's "Wall Drawing 305" and that it was written for Roomful of Teeth.

It's a unique idea: have a troika of avant-garde composers collaborate on a new piece mainly by mail from their homes in La Jolla, Tokyo and New York. Can it work? The National Endowment for the Arts is betting that it will, and has awarded an Inter-Arts grant for the project to UC San Diego's resident musical-theatrical duo, Edwin Harkins and Philip Larson (known professionally as (THE)), Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu, and premier avant-gardist John Cage.

The last instrumental work that Mozart finished before he died was his Clarinet Concerto. Schubert's last work was "Der Hirt auf dem Felsen" (The Shepherd on the Rock) for soprano, piano--and clarinet. Near the end of his life, Brahms turned to the clarinet for his Clarinet Quintet and two clarinet sonatas. Saint-Saens, Poulenc and Nielsen also wrote important works for clarinet shortly before they died. So the question arises: Clarinet--gateway to heaven, or instrument of death?

BROOKLYN, N.Y. - Composer and French horn player Matt Marks, 33, has just completed writing a vocal and orchestral work for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the biggest commission of his life, but this Sunday afternoon in March he's playing the ukulele at the New Music Bake Sale. Marks has trim sideburns and a bowl of black hair with straight bangs above thick black glasses. Wearing a plaid sports jacket and an ironic grin, he is on stage at Roulette, a club in an elegant old Art Deco theater in a building owned by the YWCA, where USO dances were once the ticket.

It wasn't B.J. Thomas, exactly, but musical raindrops seemed to be falling in a white-walled rehearsal room next to Walt Disney Concert Hall, courtesy of Milo Talwani, one of the L.A. composers least likely to write melody, let alone ear candy, into a piece of music. At 16, he's one of four area high school students taking the royal road to composing careers, at least at the outset, via the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Talwani, a lanky epitome of precocious Bohemian-intellectual cool who's a junior at the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts, had placed pizzicato plinking sounds that evoked the first spatterings of a cloudburst into a musical fragment from a work in progress.