Composers

There's so much to praise in the blissful Broadway revival of "Follies," which opened Wednesday at the Ahmanson Theatre on the heels of its numerous Tony nominations, but let's pay homage first to the sheer sophistication of the show itself. After experiencing "Follies" again - an adult entertainment if ever there was one - I flat-out refuse to accept any more jukebox substitutes. One doesn't often talk about architecture when writing about musicals, but the most impressive thing about "Follies," beyond Stephen Sondheim's bejeweled score, is the ingenious way it is constructed.

Though Carl Davis has composed scores for such films as 1981's "The French Lieutenant's Woman," over the past three decades, he's become one of silent cinema's greatest champions, composing and conducting scores for countless silent films as well as orchestrating existing scores for such silents as Charlie Chaplin's 1931 masterwork"City Lights. " In March, the U.S.-born, London-based composer earned kudos for conducting the 46-piece Oakland East Bay Symphony in his score for the restored 5 1/2-hour version of Abel Gance's 1927 epic "Napoleon.

Music composer Garry Schyman sits in his Culver City studio, at a desk topped with Gustav Mahler biographies and Krzysztof Penderecki recordings, and ponders the hero's predicament. He pivots to his keyboard and plays a handful of chords conveying utter loss, the draining of hope. If you happen to play the video game Resistance: Retribution after it's released next spring, you'll take on the role of a British soldier working to subvert an alien invasion in post-apocalyptic Europe.

Mort Lindsey, a conductor, arranger and composer best known as the music director for Judy Garland in the 1960s and for his more than two decades as music director for "The Merv Griffin Show," has died. He was 89. Lindsey, who was in declining health since breaking his hip six months ago, died May 4 at his home in Malibu, said his son Trevor. A pianist and a former staff conductor for CBS and ABC in New York in the 1950s, Lindsey was music director for Garland at her historic Carnegie Hall concert on April 23, 1961.

Composer Frank Ticheli has written a serious piece about the Los Angeles riots. But he considers his new work, "An American Dream," his first really dark composition. Subtitled "A Symphony of Songs for Soprano and Orchestra," it will receive its first performances on Wednesday and Thursday by the Pacific Symphony led by Carl St.Clair at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa.

All of St. Charles is racing to eat before the sun sets and the kids melt down. At 5:30 p.m. on a Saturday, a time when many Angelenos are just rolling out of bed, the locals of this Illinois city are pouring into the La Za Za Trattoria, a family-friendly kind of place. A sentry of highchairs lines one wall, and the occasional shriek of a cooped-up child provides dissonant harmony to the clanging of silverware against plates and the chorus of disjointed conversations.

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.

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.

Highway 1 is the most alluring music festival route in the country. A scenic drive puts you in easy reach of Mainly Mozart (San Diego), Summerfest (La Jolla), Hollywood Bowl, Songfest (Malibu), Ojai Music Festival, Music Academy of the West (Santa Barbara), Days and Nights Festival (Big Sur and Hidden Valley), Carmel Bach Festival, Cabrillo Festival (Santa Cruz), Music@Menlo, San Francisco Opera and Festival del Sole (Napa Valley). But as far as most of these presenters of chamber music, song, orchestral music, opera and new music are concerned, California is what you see out of your car window on the way to a performance.

One of the most important concerts ever given in this country was a performance at Carnegie Hall on Nov. 14, 1943, that was broadcast throughout the nation. It was the historic New York Philharmonic debut of Leonard Bernstein, a last-minute replacement for an ailing Bruno Walter. His performance was a sensation; it was front-page news and made Bernstein a household name. And on the program happened to be Theme, Variations and Finale by Miklos Rozsa.

Timpanist Joseph Pereira was in the kitchen, preparing to marinate short ribs in French wine, when he made an important discovery: That nice plastic cork at the top of the wine bottle had a terrific consistency. It wasn't long before Pereira, who has long customized his instruments, was experimenting with the plastic cork inside the end of his drum mallets. "I cut the top part off and wrapped it for a new stick, which I use every week," says the musician and composer. "It has a really warm tone to it. " His compositions also come from unlikely sources.

Stories pour out of Gabriela Lena Frank like music. Sitting on an old brown leather chair in her little house, where she lives with her grand piano, books and black Labrador retriever, she is describing her upbringing and musical education with passion and joy and not a note of calculation. The composer has electric-black curly hair and a mind as alive as morning light. Before she finishes her cup of tea, she has described, like a magical character in a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel, the influence on her music of her father, a Jewish Mark Twain scholar who grew up in the Bronx; her mother, a Peruvian whose Chinese grandfather sold shovels to miners in the 1800s; her congenital hearing loss; Graves' disease, which has diminished her eyesight; bodybuilders and Andes Mountain Indian runners; and her perfect pitch, which Frank's piano teacher discovered when Frank was 10, after Frank informed her that a harp recording of Bach's Prelude in C was really in the key of F. Frank, 39, is also glad to help journalists who stammer like flummoxed tourists to categorize her. "I'm a Berkeley gringa, Latino, Peruvian, Chinese, Lithuanian Jew, deaf, short composer!"

A bridge, of course, is a stretch of metal or stone or something that spans, typically, a body of water. But it also unites two disparate things that would otherwise remain disconnected. So it's only fitting that what could prove a breakthrough piece for the polymath young composer Gabriel Kahane is a piece about the Brooklyn Bridge. Kahane was led to this particular structure by his current locale -- he's part of a Brooklyn new-music renaissance -- as well as Hart Crane's 1930 poem "The Bridge," now considered a landmark of modernism.

Teddy Charles, a jazz vibraphonist who performed with Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Charles Mingus and other bebop-era jazz greats before becoming a charter boat captain in the Caribbean, died Monday at Peconic Bay Medical Center in Riverhead on New York's Long Island. He was 84. Charles died of complications from heart disease, according to a niece, Sally Phillips. Although he was grouped with Milt Jackson and Terry Gibbs as a premier vibraphonist of the bebop years reaching from the late 1940s through the '50s, Charles was also well-regarded as a pianist and composer whose cutting-edge recordings of the mid-1950s were forerunners of the avant-garde jazz of the following decade.

The score for Oscar Bettison's chamber concerto "Livre des Sauvages" ("The Book of Savages") should come with an IKEA-like warning: Some Assembly Required. The half-hour work, which will be given its premiere Tuesday at Walt Disney Concert Hall as part of the Los Angeles Philharmonic's Green Umbrella new music series, employs a toy piano, hotel desk bells, melodicas (with foot pumps), tuned cowbells, tuning forks, conch shells and a "wrenchophone. " The concert, to be conducted by Jeffrey Milarsky, also will feature works by Stockhausen and Cage.

Jennifer Higdon, who won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2010, says her desire to write classical music as hospitable as a Southern dinner stems from a childhood trauma: seeing performance art in the 1960s. She blames her father, a "hippie before the hippie movement," who took her and her younger brother to the High Museum of Art in Atlanta when they were kids. One "art happening," Higdon says, featured an artist, dressed in black, covered with rubber cement, strapped to a black canvas.

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.

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.

Carl St.Clair, the music director and principal conductor of Orange Country's Pacific Symphony, was a bit taken aback at one of the programming choices for the 2012 edition of the organization's American Composers Festival. This year's theme is "Nowruz — Celebrating Spring," marking the Persian New Year and celebrating the prominent Iranian American community and its vast cultural legacy. There's a world premiere of an oratorio by Iranian American composer Richard Danielpour and collaborations between the symphony and Persian music troupe the Shams Ensemble.

MUSIC Jacaranda, the Westside music series that presents obscure and experimental classical music, will stage a concert featuring the work of composers Leon Kirchner, Richard Rodney Bennett, Christopher Rouse and William Schuman. First Presbyterian Church, 1220 2nd St., Santa Monica. 8 p.m. Sat., 6 p.m. Sun. $20 to $40. (213) 483-0216, http://www.jacarandamusic.org