That’s the question I asked myself as I waited at the security gate in front of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. The Silicon Valley sun beat mercilessly upon the line of vehicles snaking into the former military complex, whose massive footprint on the map made my jaw drop when I had first looked it up online. That had been several weeks earlier, when a lovely email greeted me from NASA’s director of community relations, Terence Pagaduan. He had heard my music and wanted to show me what NASA had to offer. I went to Google Maps and saw, to my amazement, an enormous blob in San Francisco’s South Bay, a space so huge that one could fit all the three Bay Area airports inside it. I responded: yes!

Terence had encountered me by chance, attending the San Francisco Symphony premiere of The B-Sides - a brand-new orchestral work that features NASA recordings. The work’s emotional core, “Gemini in the Solar Wind,” is a kind of archival recording set to music - ambient orchestral sonorities interspersed with the ecstatic words of astronaut Ed White, whose Gemini IV voyage became the first American spacewalk. Since The B-Sides explores various surreal landscapes ‘from the flipside,’ I decided to take the piece into outer space. Apparently, Terence liked that - and offered me a private tour of NASA’s Ames Research Center as a thank-you.

So there I stood, awaiting my escort into this mysteriously gargantuan facility. It felt a bit like standing at the gates of Willy Wonka’s factory. Suddenly a black minivan appeared with a smiling Terence in the front seat, and soon we were zipping past the weapon-bedecked guards and headed for the world’s second largest wind tunnel.

Imagine standing in an enclosed space as big as a stadium – with not a soul around. The vast silence muffles every sound, as when heavy snow blankets a huge field. Inside this dark, eerily quiet hangar, NASA pilots had flown helicopters. Wind turbines as large as a six-story building could be cranked up to blast 300 mile-per-hour winds. But as we stood there, I actually was not thinking about either: I was imagining a large chorus singing a Mass, with rich harmonies echoing through this man-made cavern. Music cannot be divorced from the spaces it inhabits, so sometimes the mind will reverse-engineer a composition when encountering a spectacular space. Terence, as I soon would realize, had a good understanding of the creative imagination, and that was his entire reason for this tour.

Next stop: flight simulators. Arrayed around another warehouse were a half-dozen shipping containers on hydraulic stilts. All were still at the moment, and in fact no one was around. But soon enough, a short man wearing a baseball cap appeared from one of the many glass doors. “Is this the composer?” he asked. I soon realized that Terence had not only arranged a priceless tour, but he had briefed everyone about me ahead of time. And for some unknown reason, they were treating me like a head of state.

Before I knew it, I was sitting inside one of the shipping containers, the interior of which looked exactly like a commercial airplane. Anyone who knows my driving would question why NASA would let me play around in a flight simulator that costs more than a house. But there I was in the cockpit, with a virtual reality of San Francisco Airport around me, and I had the joy of taking off over a beautifully pixelated Bay. (No one found it amusing, however, when I buzzed the Golden Gate Bridge - I couldn’t resist.)

As we exited the flight simulation facility, I started thinking about all the machines we comfort ourselves with - and whether they, too, might have a place in the Mass that was forming in the back of my mind.

Another stop on the tour was the simple office of Carl Pilcher. This is the man who NASA uses to look for aliens. As head of the Astrobiology Center, he scours the data from NASA satellites for any hallmarks of life - underwater thermal vents, for example, or clouds of water vapor. What might look like a printout of endless numbers is, to Dr. Pilcher, a kind of giant crossword. Searching for patterns in the flood of data beamed back to Earth from NASA’s probes, Pilcher is searching for the biological version of the Holy Grail. And as he spoke with me for fifteen minutes of his valuable time, I started to wonder if, eons from now, our alien counterparts might be scanning the universe similarly. The back corner of my brain that was working on that Mass went into high gear: a fragment of a Mass, floating through space…?

By the end of the afternoon - after several other Wonka-esque visits to various extraordinary facilities - I ended up in the office of Wonka himself. Simon Worden, who runs Ames, wanted to meet the composer who had been inspired by NASA. In his office were tables covered in high-definition maps of the Moon and Mars. What looked like mission plans lay scattered about. Replicas of space vehicles adorned various tables. What on Earth (indeed) could this man need from a composer of classical music?

What I discovered is that, while NASA is very much focused on outer space, it never takes its eyes off planet Earth. In order for NASA to do its work, Simon explained, the space program needs to stay in lives of all Americans. Without public support - especially in a time when all budgets are fair game for cutting - NASA would never be able to explore, say, the methane fields of Saturn’s moon Titan. When a composer incorporates sounds from Gemini IV into a piece for the San Francisco Symphony, it means a lot to NASA. This is an institution that wants to be a part of every part of American life - not just rocket science. I wish other non-musical institutions would foster bonds with the artistic community. NASA’s light touch worked best: this was no product placement pitch. Simply put, the generous tour that Terence provided, and to which everyone I encountered so graciously contributed, was a way of saying thanks - and a way to further inspire me.

Well, it worked. Mass Transmission has already formed itself into a multi-movement work in my brain. The concept: a message in a bottle picked up by some future listening civilization. The piece could incorporate electronic sounds created from astro-biological data from Ames. These staticy, flickering textures could be encased in morphing choral settings of ancient Christian Mass texts. It is as if a bit of choral warmth from our planet - surrounded by the cold vastness of space it is floating in - is one day picked up by some distant intelligence in fragmented, pixilated form.

Thanks so much to NASA’s Ames Research Center for giving a warm welcome to a composer. We do not always feel so exalted here on Earth!

Near the end of the story, I am huddled over a score of Liquid Interface with John Adams, working out rehearsal notes during a marathon week with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. We only heard a week ago that we’d be in this together, yet John has already mastered much of the work — including the brief harmonica passage, which tickled him.

But that’s near the end; let’s start at the beginning.

One of the great pleasures of composing for orchestra is sending a piece out into the world and watching it take flight. My biggest symphonic work, Liquid Interface, lifted off beautifully a few years ago under Leonard Slatkin at the National Symphony. The orchestra, first a bit quizzical about a ‘water symphony’ integrating electronica beats, ultimately gave the piece a much-appreciated bear hug, taking it the next year to their annual visit to Carnegie Hall.

Leonard was a dream collaborator from the beginning. He generously commissioned the work based on a narrative overview, passed along to him by my mentor John Corigliano (to whom the piece is dedicated). When those words became notes, Leonard fixed his laser-attention on the smallest musical details so superbly that the premiere went off without a hitch. Pretty soon the work was being programmed under a variety of wonderful conductors spread far and wide, and Leonard programmed it this season with Los Angeles and Pittsburgh.

But suddenly in October, he suffered a heart attack. Instant medical attention was hand, thankfully, and within a few days word trickled out that his characteristic vigor had returned. His conducting was put on about as brief a hiatus as one could imagine, given the circumstance of a heart attack. But Liquid Interface’s Los Angeles performances happened to fall into the short window of Leonard’s downtime.

This is why cover conductors are always on hand — to step in on a moment’s notice.

John Adams, however, had no business conducting this piece. In the midst of presiding of the LA Phil’s Left Coast festival, he had two other programs to conduct that week, and a supremely capable conductor was on hand to cover the show (Jace Ogren). But, as he told me, he very much liked the piece and wanted to take it on.

So there I was, the week before the show, making my first visit to his home in Berkeley (about two minutes from my own) to look at the score together.

Liquid Interface covers a lot of musical terrain, all encapsulated in something of a climate narrative. In this update of a ‘water symphony,’ we begin with ice (“Glaciers Calving”) and end in hazy evaporation (“On the Wannsee”). As the temperature creeps up in each movement, so does the tension, climaxing in a electronically-processed flood whipped up by frenetic, New Orleans-inspired swing. The more I compose, the more interest I have in creating large, conceptual shapes that are driven by unique music. Neo-narrative forms do not really exist these days, so I love to go wild with them.

But John did not first take note of this grand plan. He was all about the notes, rhythms, harmonies, orchestrations — in short, the zoomed-in, nitty-gritty detail. The way the glacial chords of the first movement unfold over massive trip-hop beats, or how quicksilver figuration dances mercurially with droplet samples in ‘scherzo liquido’ — these were the things we spoke about. Sitting with a master of the orchestra in his home, pouring over a piece you spent so many months creating, hearing his comments on this passage or that — what a dream.

Ultimately, though, the large-scale form of the work became very much of interest to him. He did an admirable job of communicating this to the musicians in the short period of time we had. So when that flood in the third movement hits, the musicians had a slightly more zoomed-out perspective than their individual parts.

Liquid Interface was but one ball that John juggled that week — his Dharma at Big Sur and a Zappa program were also up the air. So I was even more touched by his devotion to the work in the midst of quite a juggling act.

A few weeks later, I swung by his home with a jar of a homemade eggnog. I like to call it ‘nostalgia in a Mason jar,’ because more than anything — more than the cognac, the dark rum, the bourbon, the eggs, or the cream — comes the rush of remembrance of an East Coast Christmas. (The concoction is decidedly old-school.)

As soon as John took a sip, he leaned back and declared ‘Now that takes me back!’

For sure, it was a pittance of a thank-you for all he had done. But hey, East Coast nostalgia is worth a lot out here.

How does an orchestra piece with electronics get legs?

The question arose last month when I was working with the Pittsburgh Symphony, whom Leonard Slatkin was leading in several amazing performances of my Liquid Interface. Experiencing this ‘water symphony’ with electronics, folks see me perched in the percussion section with a laptop, banging out beats on an electronic drumpad and triggering hurricane samples. Then they often ask, “What happens when you can’t be there?”

The answer is simple: the show goes on.

As I have pushed to have electronics enshrined as the newest section of the orchestra, many pitfalls have presented themselves. One of the biggest problems has been the desire by many electro-acoustic proponents to make the electronics the center of the performance. At quick glance, it seems a fine idea: showcase the ‘novelty item’ like a soloist. Build an elaborate instrument bedecked in contact mics. Put it front and center. Insist on its importance.

The problem is, technology changes — and when a piece becomes dependent on showcasing a particular kind of electronic instrument that goes obsolete, so does the piece.

I learned this with my “concerto for synthesizer,” written way back in 1998. The piece showcases a Yamaha V50 keyboard, and we had some beautiful performances with the Atlanta Symphony, the Phoenix Symphony, and the New Juilliard Ensemble. But these days, the keyboard is hard to find, making the work tough to program. And there are also aesthetic concerns with designing a piece around prefabricated sounds. Never again, I vowed, would I go that route.

So Liquid Interface — like all of my orchestra pieces involving electronics — can work with the simplest of devices when I am not present: a laptop. As long as there are laptops on Earth, these pieces will be logistically simple. With the rental of the score and parts, the percussionist receives a small CD with custom-designed software.

The player simply pops it into a laptop and follows the score, hitting keystrokes at rehearsal numbers (about every eight bars or so). The software uses a variety of fade times (sometimes none at all) to move from one soundfile to the next. It is not a soloistic, or even ‘performative’ part: it is simply triggering sounds, from ambient soundscapes to beats.

What’s so exciting about that? Well, just listen to the sounds emanating from the speakers.

That's where all the technology is: in the sound design itself. Back in my studio, I fashion a great deal of the sounds from scratch, looking to make a soundworld as fresh and inventive as what comes from the orchestra. It cannot be canned or synth-driven — but it needn’t be whipped up on site. By my logic, there are already eighty musicians offering wonderful performances onstage, so there’s no need to make the ‘laptop percussionist’ one of them.

The result has to be immersive and mind-blowing, yet simple and cheap to realize. So, when I am not present, all the orchestra needs are a few speakers, which (as anyone who has performed Pines of Rome knows) is not that difficult.

Of course, when an orchestra wants me to there, I bring the electronics to life in a far more performative way, pounding out techno beats, mixing ambient soundscapes and field recordings, shooting sounds across the speakers. That enhances the performance in a special way, and the presence of the composer is always welcome in new music. But I do not make these pieces live or die on my presence.

This philosophy arose out of my early experience working with orchestras on a tight budget and a union clock. Sure, I love having a group as wonderful as the Pittsburgh Symphony perform a piece — and they played Liquid about as impeccably as any orchestra I have ever heard. But I got equal pleasure, a few years ago in Virginia, hearing the Richmond Symphony perform Rusty Air in Carolina in a different church each night. If it can work in those challenging circumstances, it can work anywhere.

So far, it is working quite nicely: the imaginative and rhythmic possibilities of electronics are transforming my music, but not by stealing the show. In the end, a symphonic experience is about the orchestra — and electronics have to work within it.

When I boarded the plane in frigid Pittsburgh — where I had just finished a week of concerts — I definitely needed the heavy winter garb. Snowdrifts were everywhere, and ‘falling ice cycle’ warnings marked off sidewalks outside Heinz Hall. But as I squinted at the bright desert landscape rushing to meet our landing plane, I sure wished I had cowboy boots.

As much fun as I had performing Liquid Interface in Pittsburgh (see the previous month’s blog), I was very glad to be arriving for a week of concerts with the Arizona Music Festival. Under the direction of Robert Moody — the amazing maestro who has brought so many of my pieces to life — the festival has become the country’s premiere winter music festival.

With his unique combination of world-class musicianship and Southern charisma, Moody has attracted first-chair players from the Metropolitan Opera, the Chicago Symphony, and the Cleveland Orchestra. It helps that the festival occurs at the peak of the high season in Scottsdale, a picturesque town an hour north of Phoenix that converts visitors into instant desert groupees. But the festival’s imaginative programming also helps bring world-class talent.

Consider this year. In addition to classics by Berloiz and Tchaikovsky, Moody programmed three of my recent orchestral works. So alongside the tone poem Symphony Fantastique was Liquid Interface — a ‘water symphony’ whose neo-narrative form is enhanced by electronics. On the same concert as the pastoral Pines of Rome — the first orchestral work to use recordings of birdsong — was my Rusty Air in Carolina, which fuses field-recordings of the deep South with fluorescent orchestral sonorities.

These thrilling programs give due attention to the classics while looking beyond. It is not everyday that a festival so willingly embraces new music that incorporates, say, recordings of a NASA spacewalk (which appear in the middle movement of The B-Sides). Music festivals often occur during high seasons in tourism, and sometimes innovation can take a back seat to light fare. It is good to see the Arizona Music Festival following the lead of the Tanglewood and Cabrillo festivals, where new music has a prominent home.

One of the special things about this festival is how generously it cares for its artists. The orchestra members stay in the beautiful homes of board members and supporters, and I was given the space to bring my wife and baby.

But the icing on the cake was the helicopter ride.

Jim Morrissey, the chairman of the board, arranged for a trip to Sedona in the helicopter of Bob Dengler. The idea was to inspire a new piece about the desert landscape for next year’s festival.

Inspiration was in no short supply: the colors alone could fuel an entire work. Lifting off from Scottsdale airport, we watched the desert floor change from dark yellow to rust red to white (when we passed over some snowy peaks). The rich red formations of Sedona loomed outside our windows as we fluttered by. Indian cliff-dwellings, long abandoned, sat impossibly high in the sides of mountains. The moss-green walls of a huge canyon above the Verde River reminded me of Kauai’s Napali coast.

When we landed, headsets came off and seatbelts were unbuckled, and I turned back to Robert. This was one hell of a way to light my hair on fire: the desert landscape would receive due homage in next year’s piece. But … could the helicopter be in the piece too?

Fast forward a few weeks. It is April and I am at work in my studio in California. Blooming like a cactus flower is a piece called Desert Transport, about a fast-moving helicopter ride over the desert.

I can’t wait to have it lift off next year with the amazing Arizona Music Festival. Thanks to everyone there for such a great time.

My two-year relationship with the Chicago Symphony, which includes two new works and several performances of recent works, does not officially begin until September. But our relationship got a jump start last month when the orchestra gave four performances of Music From Underground Spaces, which was turned into a new ballet by Alejandro Cerrudo and Hubbard Street Dance.

The thrill of working with such a superb and historic orchestra would have been enough to handle, but throwing a ballet into the mix upped the ante considerably. So when I touched down in Chicago the day before the first orchestral rehearsals, I had a lot on my mind.

Heading straight from the airport into Symphony Center for the dancer’s tech rehearsal, I entered the dimly-lit, surreal world of the theater — dropped into the lush home of the Chicago Symphony. Onstage, a dozen dancers leapt and twirled amidst beautiful red- and blue-tinged lighting projections. Out in the middle of house, a scrum of techies huddled around Alejandro, who maintained a controlled expression.

He looks every part the dancer that he is, combined with the intense focus of a choreographer. Our meeting several months before had been brief but fruitful, and many phone conversations about the work followed. Here it all came to life.

Music From Underground Spaces journeys into the world beneath our feet, ultimately ending in a movement called “Tectonic Plates” where actual earthquake recordings drift under slow-moving orchestral sonorities. Alejandro created an amazing choreographic analogue to this.

The dancers spun about in quickly-changing formations during the kaleidoscopic “Tunnels.” They launched through the air over the demonic groove of “Infernos.” They floated effortlessly over the lopsided waltz of “Crystalline Cities.” And, in the final “Tectonic Plates,” they all disappeared save two, who danced a gorgeous pas-de-deux.

That tech rehearsal was my only chance to see the ballet, sitting in the vast emptiness of Symphony Center while they danced to a recording. The next day I joined the orchestra, which was playing onstage behind the dancers.

My attention was entirely focused on playing the electronic beats and triggering earthquakes. As I pounded on my electronic drumpad, I devoted one ear to the electronics and the other to the orchestra, scribbling quick notes whenever something caught my notice.

The orchestra is known for the standard repertoire, but they nailed Underground Spaces. Maestro Carlos Kalmer did a superb job bringing the piece to life. Few details escape his ears — not a missing castanet, not an errant note. Carlos knew the score inside and out, no question. And on top of the demands of conducting a new work, he had to deal with two ‘monkeys on the back:’ the electronic beats, and the ballet. Not an easy circus act when it also happens to be a CSO debut, which brings a unique kind of pressure. Carlos kept his cool throughout.

I came expecting an unmatched orchestra and a thrilling ballet, but what I did not expect was such a warm reception by the musicians themselves. Brant Taylor threw a great magnum-fueled party in his beautiful home, Nathan Cole & Akiko Tarumoto cooked an Iron Chef-worthy dinner, Ken [ ] took me out to a champagne brunch. How great it is when some of the best musicians in the world are so generous and open — that’s not something I expected before I hit the ground in Chicago.

As I headed home to Northern California, I took a deep breath. What a warm-up!

How does an orchestra piece with electronics get legs?

The question arose last month when I was working with the Pittsburgh Symphony, whom Leonard Slatkin was leading in several amazing performances of my Liquid Interface. Experiencing this ‘water symphony’ with electronics, folks see me perched in the percussion section with a laptop, banging out beats on an electronic drumpad and triggering hurricane samples. Then they often ask, “What happens when you can’t be there?”

The answer is simple: the show goes on.

As I have pushed to have electronics enshrined as the newest section of the orchestra, many pitfalls have presented themselves. One of the biggest problems has been the desire by many electro-acoustic proponents to make the electronics the center of the performance. At quick glance, it seems a fine idea: showcase the ‘novelty item’ like a soloist. Build an elaborate instrument bedecked in contact mics. Put it front and center. Insist on its importance.

The problem is, technology changes — and when a piece becomes dependent on showcasing a particular kind of electronic instrument that goes obsolete, so does the piece.

I learned this with my “concerto for synthesizer,” written way back in 1998. The piece showcases a Yamaha V50 keyboard, and we had some beautiful performances with the Atlanta Symphony, the Phoenix Symphony, and the New Juilliard Ensemble. But these days, the keyboard is hard to find, making the work tough to program. And there are also aesthetic concerns with designing a piece around prefabricated sounds. Never again, I vowed, would I go that route.

So Liquid Interface — like all of my orchestra pieces involving electronics — can work with the simplest of devices when I am not present: a laptop. As long as there are laptops on Earth, these pieces will be logistically simple. With the rental of the score and parts, the percussionist receives a small CD with custom-designed software.

The player simply pops it into a laptop and follows the score, hitting keystrokes at rehearsal numbers (about every eight bars or so). The software uses a variety of fade times (sometimes none at all) to move from one soundfile to the next. It is not a soloistic, or even ‘performative’ part: it is simply triggering sounds, from ambient soundscapes to beats.

What’s so exciting about that? Well, just listen to the sounds emanating from the speakers.

That is where all the technology is, in the sound design itself. Back in my studio, I fashion a great deal of the sounds from scratch, looking to make a soundworld as fresh and inventive as what comes from the orchestra. It cannot be canned or synth-driven - but it needn’t be whipped up on site. By my logic, there are already eighty musicians offering wonderful performances onstage, so there’s no need to make the ‘laptop percussionist’ one of them.

The result has to be immersive and mind-blowing, yet simple and cheap to realize. So, when I am not present, all the orchestra needs are a few speakers, which (as anyone who has performed Pines of Rome knows) is not that difficult.

Of course, when an orchestra wants me to there, I bring the electronics to life in a far more performative way, pounding out techno beats, mixing ambient soundscapes and field recordings, shooting sounds across the speakers. That enhances the performance in a special way, and the presence of the composer is always welcome in new music. But I do not make these pieces live or die on my presence.

This philosophy arose out of my early experience working with orchestras on a tight budget and a union clock. Sure, I love having a group as wonderful as the Pittsburgh Symphony perform a piece — and they played Liquid about as impeccably as any orchestra I have ever heard. But I got equal pleasure, a few years ago in Virginia, hearing the Richmond Symphony perform Rusty Air in Carolina in a different church each night. If it can work in those challenging circumstances, it can work anywhere.

So far, it is working quite nicely: the imaginative and rhythmic possibilities of electronics are transforming my music, but not by stealing the show. In the end, a symphonic experience is about the orchestra — and electronics have to work within it.

Delighted because their LinkUP series is one of the country’s most venerable concert series for schoolchildren, bringing in thousands of kids for a half-dozen performances of orchestral music with the St. Luke’s Orchestra.

Surprised because, well, Warehouse Medicine is a pretty hard-hitting homage to techno — not the usual fare of educational concerts. Clearly some outside-the-box thinking was going on in the ivory tower.

It’s much appreciated — and greatly needed.

Certainly it makes sense for children to be exposed to the classical warhorses, since educational concerts are often kids’ first encounter with orchestral music. Saint-Saens’ Carnival of the Animals is an obvious choice, a kind of children’s book of a piece, as well as excerpts of well-known symphonies by Beethoven or Mozart.

But one of the risks of focusing on the tried and true is that kids start to see concert music as a museum piece. For those of us in the trenches of this wonderful field, it sure doesn’t feel like we’re frozen in a wax museum somewhere. We know that concert music is a live animal. (The term ‘classical’ isn’t going anywhere, but I avoid it anyway.)

LinkUP created a very hip and informative educational concert, enhanced by beautiful visual projections that tracked shows themes.

A big part of the show’s success was the on-the-ground work that had been done in the preceding weeks. Composer Tom Cabaniss receives much credit, having introduced the kids to the show’s concepts well in advance (as well as composing many of the concert’s set pieces).

When I popped onstage for Warehouse Medicine, I received the most raucous welcome I’ve ever encountered. Surely this was partly due to the video introduction that preceded the piece, but the kids were also genuinely thrilled to hear some new music. The LinkUP crew had gotten everyone so excited about the possibilities of the orchestra that, when confronted with a not-dead-yet composer, the kids went nuts.

Maestro Rossen Milanov did a superb job bringing the piece to life. As I pounded out the electronica beats on my electronic drumpad and laptop, we shared a few harried glances when the three thousand kids spontaneous started clapping to the beat. With lots of busy figuration in the piece, it was quite a curveball to suddenly cope with a full house of not-quite-on-the-beat clapping. But it was such an exuberant contribution, everyone onstage smiled.

LinkUP is not the first concert to include my music, which has also appeared on New York Philharmonic education concerts. But it was one of the finest operations I have ever seen, and a ton of fun. If I wore a hat, I’d doff it to Marte Siebenhar and Misty Tolle, who run Carnegie’s school programs; Susan Fenichell, the show’s director; and, of course, Rossen and Tom.

The kids deserve thanks as wekk — no, let’s make that a clap.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

When I boarded the plane in frigid Pittsburgh — where I had just finished a week of concerts — I definitely needed the heavy winter garb. Snowdrifts were everywhere, and ‘falling ice cycle’ warnings marked off sidewalks outside Heinz Hall. But as I squinted at the bright desert landscape rushing to meet our landing plane, I sure wished I had cowboy boots.

As much fun as I had performing Liquid Interface in Pittsburgh (see the previous month’s blog), I was very glad to be arriving for a week of concerts with the Arizona Music Festival. Under the direction of Robert Moody — the amazing maestro who has brought so many of my pieces to life — the festival has become the country’s premiere winter music festival.

With his unique combination of world-class musicianship and Southern charisma, Moody has attracted first-chair players from the Metropolitan Opera, the Chicago Symphony, and the Cleveland Orchestra. It helps that the festival occurs at the peak of the high season in Scottsdale, a picturesque town an hour north of Phoenix that converts visitors into instant desert groupees. But the festival’s imaginative programming also helps bring world-class talent.

Consider this year. In addition to classics by Berloiz and Tchaikovsky, Moody programmed three of my recent orchestral works. So alongside the tone poem Symphony Fantastique was Liquid Interface — a ‘water symphony’ whose neo-narrative form is enhanced by electronics. On the same concert as the pastoral Pines of Rome — the first orchestral work to use recordings of birdsong — was my Rusty Air in Carolina, which fuses field-recordings of the deep South with fluorescent orchestral sonorities.

These thrilling programs give due attention to the classics while looking beyond. It is not everyday that a festival so willingly embraces new music that incorporates, say, recordings of a NASA spacewalk (which appear in the middle movement of The B-Sides). Music festivals often occur during high seasons in tourism, and sometimes innovation can take a back seat to light fare. It is good to see the Arizona Music Festival following the lead of the Tanglewood and Cabrillo festivals, where new music has a prominent home.

One of the special things about this festival is how generously it cares for its artists. The orchestra members stay in the beautiful homes of board members and supporters, and I was given the space to bring my wife and baby.

But the icing on the cake was the helicopter ride.

Jim Morrissey, the chairman of the board, arranged for a trip to Sedona in the helicopter of Bob Dengler. The idea was to inspire a new piece about the desert landscape for next year’s festival.

Inspiration was in no short supply: the colors alone could fuel an entire work. Lifting off from Scottsdale airport, we watched the desert floor change from dark yellow to rust red to white (when we passed over some snowy peaks). The rich red formations of Sedona loomed outside our windows as we fluttered by. Indian cliff-dwellings, long abandoned, sat impossibly high in the sides of mountains. The moss-green walls of a huge canyon above the Verde River reminded me of Kauai’s Napali coast.

When we landed, headsets came off and seatbelts were unbuckled, and I turned back to Robert. This was one hell of a way to light my hair on fire: the desert landscape would receive due homage in next year’s piece. But … could the helicopter be in the piece too?

Fast forward a few weeks. It is April and I am at work in my studio in California. Blooming like a cactus flower is a piece called Desert Transport, about a fast-moving helicopter ride over the desert.

I can’t wait to have it lift off next year with the amazing Arizona Music Festival. Thanks to everyone there for such a great time.

The unlikely symbiosis of classical music and club culture, which began as something of a novelty several years ago, seems to evolving into a self-contained organism these days. The question is how resilient this hybrid creature is, and whether it has something substantive to offer the cultural ecosystem.

The topic was on the minds of me and my co-conspirators, Maestro Benjamin Shwartz and installation artist Anne Patterson, when we brought Mercury Soul back to the San Francisco club Mezzanine this spring. Having launched in 2008 to a crowd of 1,400 curious listeners, Mercury Soul did a lot more than simply change the scenery on a classical concert.

Rather than just serving a few classical performances in an alternative venue and call it a night, the project makes a special effort to completely reimagine the concert experience. The event is a DJed party superimposed onto a concert of new music, with the audience roaming freely throughout the large space. Sets of live electronica and DJing are interspersed with performances of Nancarrow, for exaple, or Ligeti or Berio - with specially-composed interludes bridging between the classical/electronica alternations.

Helping guide the audience's focus is the visual touch of Patterson, whose art installations and slowly-morphing lighting reveal different parts of the space where the next performance occurs. Instead of a concert in front of seated crowd, this is more like presenting a many-stringed puppet show to a herd of roving cats. And that's why it's such a rush to pull it off.

Ten years ago, though, such an event would have been highly unlikely. It was rare enough to simply catch a classical performance at, say, the club Gallapagos in Brooklyn. The disconnect was both inspiring and irreverent -after all, the spaces of an acoustically-tuned concerto hall and a club normally populated by hipsters seemed about as far apart as possible. The disconnect was also visceral when, a few years ago, I attended the Weekend club in Berlin. Dropped into the middle of a great techno party was an appearance by Musica Antica Koeln, who performed Couperin. At first, the crowd showed curious amusement at seeing musicians playing period instruments, but that melted into impatience as the performance went past the 20-minute mark. I, too, was impatient: after all, performing 18-Century music on a harpsichord in the middle of a club, with absolutely no effort at integration, seemed a gimmick.

But sometimes the early expressions of a movement are immature but necessary catalysts for what is to come. These days, there are substantive classical/club events both large and small - venues such as NYC's Le Poisson Rouge offering eclectic programs to a devoted audience, orchestras such as the London Sinfonietta touring with Aphex Twin orchestrations, electronica artists such as Matos performing on the LA Philharmonic's Left Coast Festival. The hunger exists out of the major cultural centers too - in addition to DJing imaginative post-parties for the San Francisco Symphony, I am more and more asked by groups such as the Portland Symphony or the Chicago Chamber Musicians to curate hybrid events.

For Mercury Soul, the challenge has always been in the logistical requirements of pulling off such a free-flowing event. With DJed interludes and three open bars, Benjamin and Anne and I knew that the audience would need some gentle guidance when the classical music began. So I composed various Mercury Interludes that incorporate both club elements (electronica beats) and classical elements (the ensemble of the upcoming set), which serves to gradually shift the audience's focus. To synchronize with the conductor Benjamin Shwartz, who was mounted on platform halfway across the room, we worked out a system of colored lights to indicate entrances. Meanwhile, Anne Patterson was working from a minute-by-minute production timeline that involved slowly-morphing lights, beautifully illuminated art installations, and intricate watercolors projected around the space.

The net effect: as one might be enjoying a drink and a conversation during a DJed segment, gradually the lighting would brighten and a sinfonietta would fade into the background. Over the course of five minutes, those in your conversation might think WTF? and turn quizzically towards the stage. The DJ fades, the sinfonietta grows; program notes are projected onto the walls; and, with that, a piece of Steve Reich begins. The musical connections between Reich and electronica are fairly obvious, but we also draw parallels to, say, the ambience of Luther Adams or the pseudo-electronic textures of Ligeti.

Mercury Soul's return this spring allowed the three of us to finely tune the machine. The repertoire integrated beautifully and spanned the gamut, from a beat-driven string quartet by John Adams to an action-packed brass quintet by Luciano Berio. The amplification was more clear and better dispersed. The DJed segments incorporated more techno earlier in the evening. And Anne's web of aluminum wires, illuminated by red LED lights, instantly transformed the space into something of alien beauty.

Classical music and club culture exist perfectly well without each other - I too enjoy a Schubert Mass on its own, or an Autechre show. I don't think a confluence of the two is some kind of hipness quotient that need be present everywhere. But when it does happen - and, in particular, when it happens with substance and purpose - it can shine a new light.

That’s the question I asked myself as I waited at the security gate in front of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. The Silicon Valley sun beat mercilessly upon the line of vehicles snaking into the former military complex, whose massive footprint on the map made my jaw drop when I had first looked it up online. That had been several weeks earlier, when a lovely email greeted me from NASA’s director of community relations, Terence Pagaduan. He had heard my music and wanted to show me what NASA had to offer. I went to Google Maps and saw, to my amazement, an enormous blob in San Francisco’s South Bay, a space so huge that one could fit all the three Bay Area airports inside it. I responded: yes!

Terence had encountered me by chance, attending the San Francisco Symphony premiere of The B-Sides - a brand-new orchestral work that features NASA recordings. The work’s emotional core, “Gemini in the Solar Wind,” is a kind of archival recording set to music - ambient orchestral sonorities interspersed with the ecstatic words of astronaut Ed White, whose Gemini IV voyage became the first American spacewalk. Since The B-Sides explores various surreal landscapes ‘from the flipside,’ I decided to take the piece into outer space. Apparently, Terence liked that - and offered me a private tour of NASA’s Ames Research Center as a thank-you.

So there I stood, awaiting my escort into this mysteriously gargantuan facility. It felt a bit like standing at the gates of Willy Wonka’s factory. Suddenly a black minivan appeared with a smiling Terence in the front seat, and soon we were zipping past the weapon-bedecked guards and headed for the world’s second largest wind tunnel.

Imagine standing in an enclosed space as big as a stadium – with not a soul around. The vast silence muffles every sound, as when heavy snow blankets a huge field. Inside this dark, eerily quiet hangar, NASA pilots had flown helicopters. Wind turbines as large as a six-story building could be cranked up to blast 300 mile-per-hour winds. But as we stood there, I actually was not thinking about either: I was imagining a large chorus singing a Mass, with rich harmonies echoing through this man-made cavern. Music cannot be divorced from the spaces it inhabits, so sometimes the mind will reverse-engineer a composition when encountering a spectacular space. Terence, as I soon would realize, had a good understanding of the creative imagination, and that was his entire reason for this tour.

Next stop: flight simulators. Arrayed around another warehouse were a half-dozen shipping containers on hydraulic stilts. All were still at the moment, and in fact no one was around. But soon enough, a short man wearing a baseball cap appeared from one of the many glass doors. “Is this the composer?” he asked. I soon realized that Terence had not only arranged a priceless tour, but he had briefed everyone about me ahead of time. And for some unknown reason, they were treating me like a head of state.

Before I knew it, I was sitting inside one of the shipping containers, the interior of which looked exactly like a commercial airplane. Anyone who knows my driving would question why NASA would let me play around in a flight simulator that costs more than a house. But there I was in the cockpit, with a virtual reality of San Francisco Airport around me, and I had the joy of taking off over a beautifully pixelated Bay. (No one found it amusing, however, when I buzzed the Golden Gate Bridge - I couldn’t resist.)

As we exited the flight simulation facility, I started thinking about all the machines we comfort ourselves with - and whether they, too, might have a place in the Mass that was forming in the back of my mind.

Another stop on the tour was the simple office of Carl Pilcher. This is the man who NASA uses to look for aliens. As head of the Astrobiology Center, he scours the data from NASA satellites for any hallmarks of life - underwater thermal vents, for example, or clouds of water vapor. What might look like a printout of endless numbers is, to Dr. Pilcher, a kind of giant crossword. Searching for patterns in the flood of data beamed back to Earth from NASA’s probes, Pilcher is searching for the biological version of the Holy Grail. And as he spoke with me for fifteen minutes of his valuable time, I started to wonder if, eons from now, our alien counterparts might be scanning the universe similarly. The back corner of my brain that was working on that Mass went into high gear: a fragment of a Mass, floating through space…?

By the end of the afternoon - after several other Wonka-esque visits to various extraordinary facilities - I ended up in the office of Wonka himself. Simon Worden, who runs Ames, wanted to meet the composer who had been inspired by NASA. In his office were tables covered in high-definition maps of the Moon and Mars. What looked like mission plans lay scattered about. Replicas of space vehicles adorned various tables. What on Earth (indeed) could this man need from a composer of classical music?

What I discovered is that, while NASA is very much focused on outer space, it never takes its eyes off planet Earth. In order for NASA to do its work, Simon explained, the space program needs to stay in lives of all Americans. Without public support - especially in a time when all budgets are fair game for cutting - NASA would never be able to explore, say, the methane fields of Saturn’s moon Titan. When a composer incorporates sounds from Gemini IV into a piece for the San Francisco Symphony, it means a lot to NASA. This is an institution that wants to be a part of every part of American life - not just rocket science. I wish other non-musical institutions would foster bonds with the artistic community. NASA’s light touch worked best: this was no product placement pitch. Simply put, the generous tour that Terence provided, and to which everyone I encountered so graciously contributed, was a way of saying thanks - and a way to further inspire me.

Well, it worked. Mass Transmission has already formed itself into a multi-movement work in my brain. The concept: a message in a bottle picked up by some future listening civilization. The piece could incorporate electronic sounds created from astro-biological data from Ames. These staticy, flickering textures could be encased in morphing choral settings of ancient Christian Mass texts. It is as if a bit of choral warmth from our planet - surrounded by the cold vastness of space it is floating in - is one day picked up by some distant intelligence in fragmented, pixilated form.

Thanks so much to NASA’s Ames Research Center for giving a warm welcome to a composer. We do not always feel so exalted here on Earth!

After a wonderfully idyllic summer, I found myself touching ground in Chicago, Akron, Sarasota, and Austin over the span of four weeks in October. For a composer, it is such a blessing to hear performances - an orchestra bringing to life a 6-month-birthed work is worth the hassle of the TSA security line. But for some odd reason, performances (and trips) tend to clump together like sightings of shooting-stars, and it can be dizzying.

Early October presented a beautiful opportunity: to travel to Ohio with Chanticleer, the a cappella group with groupies spread all across planet Earth, to hear my work Sirens. The twelve men who make up this amazing chorus had already made a huge impact on me last spring, when they premiered the thirty-minute cycle of siren poetry. Not only could they bring any chord to life, they could do it in five languages (and, in one movement, while grooving with egg shakers in their hands). Beyond their unique musical gifts, though, I found a dozen intriguing people with whom I could chat on just about any topic.

There was Matt, for example, who gave me the full dossier on the Quaker Inn - a funhouse/nightmare of a hotel built out of a former silo complex. Yes, those towering cylindrical structures you see sprinkled all over Midwestern farmland - including Akron - somehow inspired an architect to fit a hotel inside one. Being one of the cursed morons who can never find his way from hotel room to elevator, I was supremely perplexed when I realized that every room in this place was a circle. If there’d been a fire, I would have given up on finding any emergency exit, and simply waited for the flames to find me in my little circle.

Luckily, the 'Tuesday Musical' group that presented Chanticleer made a lot more sense than the hotel. This excellent classical music institution is one of the country’s oldest, and they bring everyone from Joshua Bell to Yo-Yo Ma. They also know how to pack a hall: Chanticleer performed in front of over two-thousand people, a large contingent of which would burst into squealing fandom at every interval. Sirens was brought to life beautifully, and I wish I could tour around with the guys throughout this year as they bring the work to more ears.

Next stop: Florida. Like some circus magician, Pedja Muzijevic conjured a superb arts festival out of thin air. In fact, the circus was part of the act - the Ringling Center for the Arts happens on the grounds of one of the Ringling Brothers. It is hard to believe that selling circus tickets and roasted peanuts could allow one to build such a sprawling estate, complete with several large Rubens in the museum. But go to Sarasota, and you will find a magical empire of kitchy facades and beautiful banyan groves. Pedja and the festival commissioned Mainframe Tropics, a horn trio informed by both digital and marine.

Lopsided grooves open the work, stumbling around like some large mainframe computer, while the central movement explores imagery of marine snow (organic matter that slowly falls to the bottom of the deep ocean). The piece could not have been blessed by better performers: Anne-Marie McDermott on piano, Jennifer Frautschi on violin, and Eric Ruske on horn. My only regret was that I had been in Ohio when the festival got started: dance, theater, and cabaret complemented the classical music on the festival, which is also overseen by Mikhail Barishnikov.

Next stop: Chicago. In fact, I had been in Chicago at the very end of September, so this was my second trip in as many weeks. My first visit revolved primarily around choreographer Alejandro Cerrudo, who is choreographing my electro-acoustic Music From Underground Spaces. Esa-Pekka Salonen will conduct four performances of the work in April, complemented by what is sure to be incredible performances by Hubbard Street Dance.

The second trip to Chicago, however, focused on a longer trajectory: 2010-2012, during which time I will serve as composer-in-residence with the Chicago Symphony. It is a dream position, since the CSO created the composer-in-residence concept decades ago. With John Corigliano, the first composer-in-residence, the CSO showed how crucial a composer could be in advancing an orchestra's reach into the community. This mission was further serviced by Augusta Reed Thomas and, most recently, Osvaldo Golijov and Mark-Anthony Turnage.

So, with composer Anna Clyne, I will not only hear some of my music performed by one of the world's great orchestras, I will also work with the CSO on expanding classical music’s reach in the city. The biggest platform for that is MusicNow, the storied new-music organization that has attracted ever-bigger crowds at the Harris Theater. In addition, Anne and I want to bring new music to alternative spaces, much like the Mercury Soul concept I have been exploring in San Francisco. With Maestro Benjamin Shwartz and installation artist Anne Patterson, I have been creating large, free-flowing events that superimpose DJ sets with performances of classical music (go to mercurysoul.org for more info, and to check out our Nov 13 show).

Anna and I were on the ground for two days of meetings and press conferences, and we both left with strong wind at our backs. The excitement of working with the CSO is hard to tamp down!

My final trip was to Austin, Texas, where Jerry Junkin and the UT Austin Wind Band premiered Rusty Air in Carolina (wind version). The original piece, commissioned by the Winston-Salem Symphony, uses electronics to bring the white-noise of Southern insects into the concert hall.

Alternatively ambient and groovy, with an insectoid beat infecting the middle of the work, Rusty Air exploits the winds, brass, and percussion so much that I always imagined it working for symphonic band. Jerry Junkin, the preeminent symphonic band conductor, was generous enough to put together a consortium to commission the wind transcription. Even after all the advance word about Texas players, I was still bowled-over by the skill of these players. Not only did they dominate the piece, but they webcast it as well! Too bad orchestras can't get it together to do something similar!

So, after racking up quite a number of miles, here I am back in North Oakland, enjoying the end of the Indian Summer. Now, let the composing begin!

What a long strange (bunch of) trip it’s been.

After a wonderfully idyllic summer, I found myself touching ground in Chicago, Akron, Sarasota, and Austin over the span of four weeks in October. For a composer, it is such a blessing to hear performances - an orchestra bringing to life a 6-month-birthed work is worth the hassle of the TSA security line. But for some odd reason, performances (and trips) tend to clump together like sightings of shooting-stars, and it can be dizzying.

Early October presented a beautiful opportunity: to travel to Ohio with Chanticleer, the a cappella group with groupies spread all across planet Earth, to hear my work Sirens. The twelve men who make up this amazing chorus had already made a huge impact on me last spring, when they premiered the thirty-minute cycle of siren poetry. Not only could they bring any chord to life, they could do it in five languages (and, in one movement, while grooving with egg shakers in their hands). Beyond their unique musical gifts, though, I found a dozen intriguing people with whom I could chat on just about any topic.

There was Matt, for example, who gave me the full dossier on the Quaker Inn - a funhouse/nightmare of a hotel built out of a former silo complex. Yes, those towering cylindrical structures you see sprinkled all over Midwestern farmland - including Akron - somehow inspired an architect to fit a hotel inside one. Being one of the cursed morons who can never find his way from hotel room to elevator, I was supremely perplexed when I realized that every room in this place was a circle. If there’d been a fire, I would have given up on finding any emergency exit, and simply waited for the flames to find me in my little circle.

Luckily, the 'Tuesday Musical' group that presented Chanticleer made a lot more sense than the hotel. This excellent classical music institution is one of the country’s oldest, and they bring everyone from Joshua Bell to Yo-Yo Ma. They also know how to pack a hall: Chanticleer performed in front of over two-thousand people, a large contingent of which would burst into squealing fandom at every interval. Sirens was brought to life beautifully, and I wish I could tour around with the guys throughout this year as they bring the work to more ears.

Next stop: Florida. Like some circus magician, Pedja Muzijevic conjured a superb arts festival out of thin air. In fact, the circus was part of the act - the Ringling Center for the Arts happens on the grounds of one of the Ringling Brothers. It is hard to believe that selling circus tickets and roasted peanuts could allow one to build such a sprawling estate, complete with several large Rubens in the museum. But go to Sarasota, and you will find a magical empire of kitchy facades and beautiful banyan groves. Pedja and the festival commissioned Mainframe Tropics, a horn trio informed by both digital and marine.

Lopsided grooves open the work, stumbling around like some large mainframe computer, while the central movement explores imagery of marine snow (organic matter that slowly falls to the bottom of the deep ocean). The piece could not have been blessed by better performers: Anne-Marie McDermott on piano, Jennifer Frautschi on violin, and Eric Ruske on horn. My only regret was that I had been in Ohio when the festival got started: dance, theater, and cabaret complemented the classical music on the festival, which is also overseen by Mikhail Barishnikov.

Next stop: Chicago. In fact, I had been in Chicago at the very end of September, so this was my second trip in as many weeks. My first visit revolved primarily around choreographer Alejandro Cerrudo, who is choreographing my electro-acoustic Music From Underground Spaces. Esa-Pekka Salonen will conduct four performances of the work in April, complemented by what is sure to be incredible performances by Hubbard Street Dance.

The second trip to Chicago, however, focused on a longer trajectory: 2010-2012, during which time I will serve as composer-in-residence with the Chicago Symphony. It is a dream position, since the CSO created the composer-in-residence concept decades ago. With John Corigliano, the first composer-in-residence, the CSO showed how crucial a composer could be in advancing an orchestra's reach into the community. This mission was further serviced by Augusta Reed Thomas and, most recently, Osvaldo Golijov and Mark-Anthony Turnage.

So, with composer Anna Clyne, I will not only hear some of my music performed by one of the world's great orchestras, I will also work with the CSO on expanding classical music’s reach in the city. The biggest platform for that is MusicNow, the storied new-music organization that has attracted ever-bigger crowds at the Harris Theater. In addition, Anne and I want to bring new music to alternative spaces, much like the Mercury Soul concept I have been exploring in San Francisco. With Maestro Benjamin Shwartz and installation artist Anne Patterson, I have been creating large, free-flowing events that superimpose DJ sets with performances of classical music (go to mercurysoul.org for more info, and to check out our Nov 13 show).

Anna and I were on the ground for two days of meetings and press conferences, and we both left with strong wind at our backs. The excitement of working with the CSO is hard to tamp down!

My final trip was to Austin, Texas, where Jerry Junkin and the UT Austin Wind Band premiered Rusty Air in Carolina (wind version). The original piece, commissioned by the Winston-Salem Symphony, uses electronics to bring the white-noise of Southern insects into the concert hall.

Alternatively ambient and groovy, with an insectoid beat infecting the middle of the work, Rusty Air exploits the winds, brass, and percussion so much that I always imagined it working for symphonic band. Jerry Junkin, the preeminent symphonic band conductor, was generous enough to put together a consortium to commission the wind transcription. Even after all the advance word about Texas players, I was still bowled-over by the skill of these players. Not only did they dominate the piece, but they webcast it as well! Too bad orchestras can't get it together to do something similar!

So, after racking up quite a number of miles, here I am back in North Oakland, enjoying the end of the Indian Summer. Now, let the composing begin!

Wait — Schoenberg at happy-hour? On Friday the 13th? Would this idea ever fly?

First consider classical music’s ever-hastening quest for relevance. Cosmetic changes to the format abound but often seem short-sighted. For example, scrapping the dress code to allow patrons to wear blue jeans deprives an audience of something that many enjoy during a ‘night at to the symphony’ — getting dressed up and making a night of it. Adding a slideshow of animals at the zoo to Saint-Saens’ Carnival Overture does not serve an artistic purpose beyond an educational concert. Watering down a program with pops pieces or tributes to video-game music bypasses much of the symphonic music that has made the orchestra great.

These efforts might work once or twice, but they are unlikely to pan out in the long run. So what about putting classical music in a club?

Mercury Soul is an elaborate, freeform party that integrates classical music and electronica, a hybrid musical event produced in collaboration with two key players: Maestro Benjamin Shwartz and set designer Anne Patterson. Our goal is not simply changing the context — after all, the novelty of playing Bach in a club eventually wears off — but to blow the minds of both classical and electronica fans.

Imagine this: the sun sets on San Francisco’s workweek. You are your coworkers who haven’t yet been fired want strong drinks and good music. One of them has seen a mysterious violin-shaped flyer advertising a party combing classical music and electronica. In the mood for something a little different, you head to 111 Minna, a cavernous art gallery by day that turns into a thumping club at night.

The mammoth space is dimly lit, with large art installations hanging high above the floor. A DJ spins groovy trip-hop, accompanied by a magnificent upright bassist on a mammoth sound system. A crowd of four hundred flows throughout the space. Mojitos are ordered, flirtation abounds, a caveman/hippie from the 60’s gyrates to himself on the dance floor.

So, how on Earth will we get from here to the jarring modernism of Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire?

Very carefully.

One crucial step is to ‘mix in’ the classical musicians. Engineering a large party is a sophisticated form of crowd control. If one were to simply stop DJing and have the musicians begin, the lack of transition would feel a little like turning the lights on at a movie theater. Everything needs to be smoothly handled. So, for all of Mercury Soul’s events, I compose ‘Mercury Interludes’ that integrate the classical players into a world of electronica grooves, allowing me to gradually move out of the DJ segments and bring the musicians into focus.

One moment, you are talking with your buddy while minimal techno plays; the next, you hear a string quartet morphing into the texture. Soon you start to notice the ensemble that has formed onstage, grooving with the electronica. The beats fade away, the musicians continue, the lights brighten onstage — and soon everyone is focused on the ensemble alone. The listening perception required by classical music is far different from the more dispersed one of electronica. So these interludes do two things at once: they creatively call attention to the ensemble, and they exploit the musical opportunities of fusing classical instruments with electronica.

The other crucial component is programming. In our first events, we focused entirely on contemporary music that would flow logically from the pulsing beats and hypnotic textures of electronica. But with this latest party, the idea was to try a mixture of old and new, partly in deference to the happy-hour time.

So the program included music from the 17th Century (Gabrielli brass quintets), the 18th (Mozart’s String Quintet in G minor), and the 20th (Schoenberg’s Pierrot). The latter piece, a dark cabaret seen through an atonal, modernist perspective, might seem a hard sell to an afterwork crowd. But even though it was not as easy to swallow as the Mozart, Pierrot came off in a way I have never experienced in a concert hall.

The work’s hyper theatricality seemed even more surreal in the dimly-lit ambience of 111 Minna, with a curious crowd pressing in from all sides to catch the work’s nuances. All we needed was a smoky haze hanging above the crowd, and we could have been in cabaret-mad Berlin circa 1920. And the work’s form of lots of miniatures — some movements are only one or two minutes — offered bite-sized nuggets well-suited for an unseated crowd. (Everything seems longer when you are standing.)

Not everyone loved the Schoenberg, but just about everyone had their sensibilities reshuffled by hearing it. And that is our mission at Mercury Soul: not to replace the concert hall experience with easy-listening cross-over, but to complement it with an immersive event that surprises both classical and electronica fan alike.

Many thanks to the excellent musicians from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music for joining the party.