Composer

The rotoscoped 2006 film A Scanner Darkly begins seven years from now with a scene that sends shivers down spines. As Freck (Rory Cochrane) twitches and itches, aphids scramble down from his scalp and across his whole body. Graham Reynolds struggled for nearly 1 1/2 years to create the right music for this eerie, frantic scene. "It was the first scene we worked on, and it was the very last scene we finished," Reynolds confessed. Two nights before the soundtrack was due, he and his Austin, Texas, band, the Golden Arm Trio, scrapped the version they had in favor of a completely new one. Richard Linklater's film of Philip K. Dick's haunting novel stars Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson and Winona Ryder.

THE COMPOSER / / Jonathan Leshnoff's music has been performed throughout the country by a wide variety of ensembles. The 33-year-old New Jersey native, who studied composition at the Peabody Institute, is an associate professor at Towson University. He lives in Northwest Baltimore with his wife and two children. IN HIS WORDS / / The commission for the piece originated with the Handel Choir of Baltimore. And then the Baltimore Chamber Orchestra came in. They're the major commissioners, and they will collaborate on the premiere performance.

Posterity hasn't always tipped its cap respectfully in the direction of Antonio Vivaldi, the facile composer of the baroque era whose many works won him acclaim at the Austrian imperial court and in his native Italy.The great Igor Stravinsky once dismissed Vivaldi as "a dull fellow who could compose the same form over and so many times over."Our baroque-smitten record-buying public has overruled Stravinsky's curmudgeonly verdict.None of Vivaldi's 700-plus compositions is better loved than his pictorial set of four concertos for solo violin and string orchestra, "The Four Seasons."

Critics may see him as Mr. Hyde, but in his heart, songwriter Frank Wildhorn is Dr. Jekyll, fighting for a cause he believes in."My ambition is to be a bridge between popular music and the world of theater," says Wildhorn, who is often criticized for the generic Top 40 sound of his Broadway shows. "If we are going to have a healthy theater in the new millennium, we have to cultivate new audiences. We need to speak to them in a musical vocabulary they can understand, not the language of 30 or 40 years ago."

Adolphus Hailstork is understandably excited that a major American orchestra is about to devote an entire program to his music."You bet I am," says the composer by telephone from Norfolk, Va., about tonight's performance of an all-Hailstork program by the Baltimore Symphony in Meyerhoff Hall."

Orion Weiss, a last-minute replacement for Andre Watts as soloist in last week's performances by the Baltimore Symphony and guest conductor Jeffrey Tate of Shostakovich's Concerto No. 2, is already a fine pianist and has the potential to be a great one. He has a beauty of sound, a crisp command of rhythm, a fantastic ability to get over the keys and an elegance that permits notes to roll deliciously off his fingers.This 17-year-old, a student at Hawken High School in Lyndhurst, Ohio, has received superb training from several distinguished pianists, including Paul Schenly and Serge Babayan, at the Cleveland Institute of Music.

Who was the greatest American composer of the 20th century? Some would say it was Aaron Copland, who evoked the American landscape as vividly in music as John Ford did in film. Others would argue that it was Charles Ives, who composed music unlike anything heard before or since. Still others would strike up the band for George Gershwin, who brought the blues to symphony hall.Yet as admirable as those men were, another composer towers over them: Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington, who was born in Washington 100 years ago this Thursday.

Ray Repp has dug his heels in, but good.When the local songwriter took on internationally known and phenomenally successful composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, he knew things could get nasty. Things did."I didn't know I was butting up against one of the richest people in England," Repp says. He was.It was July 1990 when Repp filed a lawsuit against Lloyd Webber, claiming that the superstar composer of "Cats" and "The Phantom of the Opera" stole one of his songs. Lloyd Webber strongly denies it. He has said in court that he had never heard of Repp nor any of his music before the lawsuit.

The first Baltimore Symphony pops concert of the season is also a classical-music concert. Classical, that is, if you understand the term to refer to great music that lasts and that belongs as much to the European as to African-American traditions.We are talking about the music of George Gershwin, who, 100 years after his birth, remains this country's best-known composer and the one whom -- to audiences and musicians elsewhere on Earth -- epitomizes American music.BSO principal pops conductor Marvin Hamlisch will conduct an all-Gershwin program Oct 1-4 in honor of the composer's centennial.

Alfred Schnittke was an uncommonly lucky composer.He lived most of his life in the former Soviet Union, a politically repressive regime in which his music was often blacklisted. That his father was a Latvian Jew, his mother a German Roman Catholic and that he himself was attracted to Buddhism led to a lifelong sense of rootlessness.The only people he could trust were other artists who suffered for some of the same reasons he did. He was haunted by death, not only because of his own poor health -- several heart attacks and massive strokes left him nearly paralyzed -- but also because many friends, relatives and colleagues disappeared, never to return, into the Soviet gulag.

"I got more in me, and you can set it free. I can catch the moon in my hand. ... " - from "Fame," by Michael Gore and Dean Pitchford Scott AuCoin really is trying to catch the moon in his hand, along with the stars above a Massachusetts hilltop, the feel of the grass beneath his back and the sound of his friends' voices. At age 17, the high school senior and budding composer already has his first commission under his belt, a five-minute concerto for full orchestra called "Light the Path."

Make us grow in love - from Eucharistic Prayer II, Roman Catholic Mass When Leonard Bernstein undertook to create a work for the opening of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, it was inevitable that he would think big. Very big. The result was Mass, subtitled A Theatre Piece for Singers, Players and Dancers. There has never been, and probably never will be, anything quite like it. Since its premiere Sept. 8, 1971, it has generated mixed reactions, from ecstatic to dismissive.

Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Christopher Rouse was born and raised in Mount Washington, attended the Gilman School and went on to earn degrees from Oberlin Conservatory and Cornell University. He has taught at the Juilliard School since 1997 and this spring was named composer-in-residence at Peabody Conservatory. BSO music director Marin Alsop is an avid champion of Rouse's work. "History's 100 Greatest Composers" by Helen L. Kaufmann This book was published when I was a young boy who had recently decided to become a composer.

Not too gimmicky and not too talky (well, most of the time), CSI: Beethoven, the brainchild of Baltimore Symphony Orchestra music director Marin Alsop, fused historical research, medical diagnoses, theatrical impersonation, slide projections and occasional music in an innovative fashion. Given in two parts, Wednesday and last night at the Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, the show reflected Alsop's own interest in the CSI franchise on TV, as well as a desire to provide an extra hook for the BSO's current Beethoven-filled season by investigating the composer's deafness and death.

Annapolis Symphony Orchestra management billed last weekend's concerts as evenings of "Bittersweet Beauty" and, for once, its chosen title actually said something about the music. The bitter and the sweet are most assuredly in the air whenever Sir Edward Elgar's Cello Concerto is performed. Composed in 1918 in the shadow of the unspeakable losses suffered during the Great War, the concerto is an elegy to sadness with the cello - that most mellifluous of solo instruments - conveying its comforting messages of nobility and uplift as the somber moods and textures roll by. That the piece has become associated with Jacqueline du Pre (1945-1987)

David Brunner stood before 300 students who gathered to sing in the auditorium at North Harford Middle School. Several times, the acclaimed composer and conductor led them through "A Living Song," a piece for which he wrote the music. "There just aren't enough magic things in our world today, so let's linger on the word `magic' when you sing it," said Brunner, who then demonstrated the technique for the youngsters. For the students, Brunner's visit Friday was a chance to work with an accomplished composer; for Brunner, it was a chance to help the students find confidence and comfort as singers.

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THE COMPOSER / / Jonathan Leshnoff's music has been performed throughout the country by a wide variety of ensembles. The 33-year-old New Jersey native, who studied composition at the Peabody Institute, is an associate professor at Towson University. He lives in Northwest Baltimore with his wife and two children. IN HIS WORDS / / The commission for the piece originated with the Handel Choir of Baltimore. And then the Baltimore Chamber Orchestra came in. They're the major commissioners, and they will collaborate on the premiere performance.

It's easy to make too much of a composer's nationality, especially since music is, as you may have heard, the universal language. But the current Baltimore Symphony Orchestra program reiterates some interesting points about the subject nonetheless. Three composers and three countries are represented, and you couldn't possibly mistake which is which. Although lots of Americans used to consider Antonin Dvorak's Symphony No. 9 practically one of our own works, so plentiful were the African and Native American tunes supposedly in it, the thing is Czech through and through.

The rotoscoped 2006 film A Scanner Darkly begins seven years from now with a scene that sends shivers down spines. As Freck (Rory Cochrane) twitches and itches, aphids scramble down from his scalp and across his whole body. Graham Reynolds struggled for nearly 1 1/2 years to create the right music for this eerie, frantic scene. "It was the first scene we worked on, and it was the very last scene we finished," Reynolds confessed. Two nights before the soundtrack was due, he and his Austin, Texas, band, the Golden Arm Trio, scrapped the version they had in favor of a completely new one. Richard Linklater's film of Philip K. Dick's haunting novel stars Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson and Winona Ryder.