Composition

Nadia Boulanger thought of herself simply as a teacher. That's a little bit like thinking of Michelangelo as an illustrator, Beethoven as a tunesmith or Shakespeare as a storyteller. Boulanger was a force, a landmark, a gauge. Her one-woman school in Paris, affectionately known as the "Boulangerie," shaped destinies.

Commercial-music licensing is a booming business, as advertisers, filmmakers, TV producers and others use pop songs to gloss their products. Recent ad spots include Texas blues star Gary Clark Jr.'s soulful number "Next Door Neighbor Blues" as the soundtrack to a recent J.C. Penney Co. swimwear ad, British folk singer Jake Bugg's "Lightning Bolt" selling Gatorade, and Seattle's breakout hip-hop team Macklemore and Ryan Lewis' "Can't Hold Us" hawking...

Ojai Music Festival: A review of the Ojai Music Festival in Tuesday's Calendar section misspelled the Steve Reich composition "Tehillim" as "Tehellim."

Say yes to "No. " An entire country did, causing a political earthquake that uprooted a tenacious dictatorship and formed the basis of this smart, involving and provocative new film. Starring Gael García Bernal, "No" is inspired by a real-life 1988 scenario that marked the beginning of the end for Chile's brutal Augusto Pinochet dictatorship. It's an irresistible fable of sorts about the power of counter-intuitive thinking, but it is also something more. As put together by some of Chile's top cinematic talents, a hit at Cannes and one of the five foreign-language Oscar nominees this year, "No" is also unexpectedly amusing and as savvy as it gets about the psychology of the political process.

In response to the issue of the Beastie Boys' use of sampling the musical sound from composer-flutist James Newton's recorded composition "Choir" ("A Musician Writes It, a Rapper Borrows It; A Swap or a Threat?" by Geoff Boucher, Sept. 21), Beastie Boys member Adam Yauch misses the point when he states, "What we used is three notes and three notes do not constitute a composition." It is not the three notes that they used, it is the unmistakable sound of those three notes of James Newton in both his performance and composition.

I don't live in the Southland, but I must assume that it is a very cold winter down there, since both Dave Taylor of the Kings and Fred Claire of the Dodgers have been spending all of their time sitting on their hands. While other general managers have been going out and making trades to improve their teams, Claire and Taylor keep peddling how much they like the composition of their teams. Hint to both: The other teams in your divisions like the composition of your teams too! BILL COADY Paradise, Calif.

I enjoy your Travel section. But I have to take exception to the May 27 My Best Shot of sunflowers in South Dakota. It falls short on composition, lighting and interest. Also, I would have no idea where the photographer traveled to, based on this photo. EILEEN GILMORE Yorba Linda

Several terrible thoughts come to mind regarding the "premiere" of Robert Erickson's "Corona," commissioned by the L.A. Philharmonic and radically edited by conductor Andre Previn ("Previn Wields Baton--and Scissors--for Erickson Premiere" by Martin Bernheimer, Feb. 4). Is this the start of a practice wherein conductors will assume absolute authority over compositions and alter them to suit their and the presumed audience's taste? Will a composition performed in Houston be completely different when performed in New York?

What distinguishes Walter Herrington's Pasadena home is not so much the 1950s architecture, which is quite lovely, nor the vista of the arroyo, though that's beautiful too. What sets apart the dwelling are his possessions, more specifically the graphic way in which he displays them ? not surprising given that his business, the Tulino Design Group of Hollywood, is a design packager and photographer for the home products industry, with clients such as Bed Bath & Beyond, Costco, Lamps Plus and Nambé.

Amedeo de Filippi, who created orchestral, choral and chamber music for ballets, radio and philharmonic groups, has died in Burbank. He was 90. As a composer, arranger and orchestrator, Mr. de Filippi was on the staff of the Columbia Broadcasting System and also worked for Pathe Films, Judson Radio Program Co., Victor Phonograph Co. and several theaters and publishers. He died June 15 of complications from a recent stroke, said his wife, Della Posner de Filippi. Born Feb.

Sharp home price increases - particularly in once-decimated cities such as Phoenix and Las Vegas - are raising concern among some economists that speculation could return to certain markets if such double-digit gains continue. Prices jumped 22.8% in Phoenix and 10% in Las Vegas in a year, according to November data released Tuesday from the S&P/Case-Shiller indexes. Such increases could fuel a short-term mind-set, economists warned. California cities are also on the upswing, with San Diego rising 8%, Los Angeles up 7.7% and San Francisco increasing 12.7%.

John Wooden is back. Not soon enough, in this me-first, Black Mamba world riddled with ego and hubris. Wooden's glory grows with each passing year, and every time Jonathan Vilma appeals his NFL case, or Lance Armstrong insists it's all a set-up. With Vince Lombardi, Wooden is the symbol of "old school" values. His simple virtues, his stubbornness, his bone-deep integrity are needed now more than ever. Got a hole in your Friday schedule? Take your kid over to UCLA to meet Coach. In the little village of Westwooden.

Before Reykjavik became cool and clubby, before there were Björk and Sigur Rós and the cozy mix of musical genres found on the Icelandic record label and composer collective Bedroom Community, the only internationally known (and barely) Icelandic composer was a craggy individualist, Jón Leifs. He represented the Nordic island as seeming so fascinatingly remote from Europe and America that it might almost be on another planet. But the Reykjavik revealed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic's Green Umbrella Concert on Tuesday night in Walt Disney Hall felt more like a bedroom community of L.A. and New York.

Like most Mexican teens of her generation, Fernanda Ulibarri grew up idolizing the Argentine rock group Soda Stereo and its emotive frontman Gustavo Cerati. Soda Stereo was one of the key bands during the heady days of creative liberation in the mid-1980s that followed the end of Argentina's military dictatorship. The trio also was one of the first South American groups to fully assimilate the shimmering guitar chords and reggae-fied beats of the post-punk era, and are sometimes regarded as Latin America's answer to the Police, with Cerati projecting the charisma of a Spanish-language Sting.

There were 122 pieces in Matjames Metson's weeklong exhibition at Coagula Curatorial this month: assemblage works of every size and shape, hung nearly edge to edge across the gallery's three adjacent walls, with a handful of free-standing sculptures placed around the floor. Each piece consisted of countless smaller elements, all common objects marked by the traces of some previous life. Pencils, matches, rulers, typewriter keys, jewelry, watch parts, bones, stamps, nails, hardware, scraps of handwritten letters, pages of books and scores of vintage photographs - Metson's materials come with stories of their own, which he weaves into eloquent, finely wrought, 3-D compositions, no inch of which goes bare or unconsidered.

Karl Benjamin, a painter of dazzling geometric abstractions who established a national reputation in 1959 as one of four Los Angeles-based Abstract Classicists and created a highly acclaimed body of work that celebrates the glories of color in all its variations, has died. He was 86. Benjamin died Thursday of congestive heart failure at his home in Claremont, said his daughter Beth Marie Benjamin. His work had been displayed last year in "Karl Benjamin and the Evolution of the Abstraction, 1950-1980" at the Louis Stern Fine Arts gallery in West Hollywood as part of the region-wide Pacific Standard Time exhibitions.

I knew Leonard Stein from the many concerts around town where he was a performer or attendee ("Leonard Stein, 87; Schoenberg Institute Chief, Pianist, Teacher," by Mark Swed, June 25). But I knew him mostly from the music concerts run by Dorrance Stalvey at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. As I became more acquainted with him (he was already an elderly man), and we would sometimes talk, I became increasingly intimidated by his history, his musical knowledge and criticisms, his acid-tongued opinions and his being, toward the end, a kind of curmudgeon.

The New Music L.A. 1987 festival seems to mean many things to many people. Perhaps too many things. Perhaps too many people. At one extreme, the ballyhooed series embraces fancy, grandiose concerts dominated by such avant-gardish superstars as Pierre Boulez and John Cage. At the other extreme, it lends surface validation to would-bes, has-beens, nonentities and dilettantes. If music is new, it must be worth hearing. Or so the optimistic management would have us believe.

A one-page document signed by Polish composer and pianist Frederic Chopin is on the auction block through Wednesday and has proved more popular with bidders than anticipated. The document , a receipt dated March 1840, is for the sale of the copyrights to his compositions Grande Valse brillante Opus 42 and Quatre Mazurkas, Op. 41, sold for 16 pounds to a music publishing company in London. The document, being sold by a private collector, was expected to fetch $10,000 to $15,000.

The next time you kill an insect, you might want to do it quickly - for the sake of the environment. New research shows that whether an animal lives in safety or is terrorized by a predator can change the biochemical trajectory of the local ecosystem where it dies. The findings point to an expanded role for both predators and prey in their local environments, and may affect which species conservationists believe are most important to keep around. The total mass of animals on the planet is puny compared with that of plants and bacteria.