He Needs a 25-Hour Day

To find one of the West Coast’s most promising, and enterprising, young composers, drive to Oxnard and hang a left. Proceed toward the ocean, and keep going until the road runs out. There on a beachfront street in the area called Channel Islands is Miguel del Aguila’s neat townhouse.

Del Aguila, whose distinctive style incorporates vernacular Latin American elements, neo-romantic flair and a postmodernist’s sense of irony, has lived by the beach for a year, but he has had little time to catch the rays. Instead, he’s been hunkered down, working on a steady stream of commissioned works. Nonetheless, when he opens the door to his house, the 40-year-old Del Aguila has the wind-swept look of a beachcomber--or a composer interrupted in mid-musical thought.

“You caught me working on Page 122 of my opera,” he says, pointing to manuscript paper on his writing table. “The soprano can’t wait to see what she will be singing.”

That work, a chamber opera, actually, is called “Composer Missing.” Del Aguila is writing the libretto and the music, and it will be performed on May 15 and 23 by the Ojai Camerata, a semiprofessional group that Del Aguila has directed this season.

By his own account, the chamber opera will be a provocative, personal statement and the capper in a busy year of projects. One of the most anticipated of those works will be another premiere, “Clocks,” a piano quintet featuring Cuarteto Latinoamericano, at Ventura City Hall on Saturday, as part of the Ventura Chamber Music Festival.

Commissioned by the festival, which is hosting Cuarteto Latinoamericano in residency this year, “Clocks” was written especially for that Mexico City-based group, with a piano part for Del Aguila himself. Although the quartet has performed pieces by Del Aguila, this will be the first time they have done a project in collaboration, with the composer onstage.

“Altogether, this season, I’ve written about a thousand pages,” Del Aguila says, a bit disarmed by the realization. “It’s a nice feeling. But you have to be careful what you wish for because it might come true. I always wanted to just write music and live from that. This season, I’ve been doing it nonstop. I wrote some of the pieces I always wanted to write, like the quintet, but I had to write in a hurry. After this opera, I’m going to take a break.”

Since landing in Oxnard in 1992, after growing up in his native Uruguay, studying in California and living in Vienna, Del Aguila’s career has been steadily taking off. He is a good example of the self-reliant independent composer, not aligned with academia, who has nurtured his own fate. Along the way, he’s had pieces commissioned and performed by many Southern California musical organizations, including a clarinet quintet for the Pacific Serenades chamber ensemble in Los Angeles, and, for Ventura County’s New West Symphony, his first Piano Concerto.

In addition, last season, his orchestral piece “Conga” was performed by the Long Beach Symphony. And his works have been recorded on two new releases--”Presto #2” is on Cuarteto Latinoamericano’s “Four, for Tango” (New Albion), and his Wind Quintet is on an album called “Discoveries” (Helicon) by the Borealis Wind Quintet. The latter piece won the prestigious Kennedy Center Friedheim Award in 1995.

Along the way, Del Aguila has been treated kindly by the press. The New York Times hailed his popular Toccata, noting that “its deft pop rhythms created a clear, vivid background.” American Record Guide called his work “wonderfully expressive music,” and Americas Magazine called him an artist “of growing international reputation who has stirred passionate interest among the classical music media world.”

He credits his adopted hometown, in a backhanded way, with some of his success. He settled here, after a decade in Vienna, because he liked the open space and rural ambience, qualities he discovered while visiting his parents, who moved to Oxnard in 1980.

“Probably my career would go a lot faster if I lived in downtown New York,” Del Aguila concedes. “I could meet all these big people after every concert, and my music would get played. I wonder, though, if I would have the peace of mind to write what I want.

“In Vienna, there was too much culture,” he says with a grin, “which sounds horrible to say, but for a composer, there can be. When you are bombarded by concerts and cultural activities, there is a point where you want to shake it all off and go to the middle of the jungle and produce what you have in your mind.

“To me, Oxnard was like the jungle.” Del Aguila laughs but adds quickly, “Look out the window and see the beauty of this place.”

Hometown dealings haven’t always been blissful for the composer, who can be outspoken in his views. In 1995, he briefly joined the Oxnard Fine Arts Commission, but his creative agenda didn’t match the board’s--it wasn’t a good fit. Ultimately, he channeled his frustrations into music, writing the work “Valse Brutal” (Brutal Waltz) about his bureaucratic adventure.

Real life does tend to creep into his music. “Composer Missing” is his second opera (his first, “Cuauhtemoc,” is an Aztec saga with political overtones) and is meant “to include a part of my personality which I consider very important, which is my humor and my sarcasm about things.”

The story comes from “a need to tell the world what it is to be a composer,” he says. “People have no idea. Every time there are operas or plays, movies, I have the feeling that everything focuses around the people who show their faces--the actors, the prima donnas, the singers. People ignore those who are really the creators. I do think that’s unfair.”

In Del Aguila’s slightly surreal libretto, there is a composer-protagonist and muse-like second bananas. “It’s the strangest thing that I’ve ever done,” he confesses. “I’m writing this opera about writing this opera and the characters that are writing the opera keep fighting with one another about how the opera should be written.

“In the whole first act, the composer is bored. He’s tired of the mediocrity of his world he’s living in. So he just makes fun of everything. It’s not me, [but it] gives me a chance to say what I think.” Del Aguila won’t say what happens in the end, only that the opera is “pretty strong about publishers, and the way people exploit the creators, who never get paid enough.”

Not all his work is close to the emotional bone. “Clocks,” for instance, is more about technical matters than personal drama. It makes use of unusual playing and composing methods--pizzicato and harmonic patterns--and mixes ticking clocks into the instrumentation.

Not surprisingly, Del Aguila characterizes his musical goals as eclectic, and proudly admits to being a romantic, even when that wasn’t particularly fashionable: “When I started writing music, they just put a 12-tone row in front of people and said, ‘Do it like this and this and like that.’ I thought, ‘These people must be nuts. That’s not the way you write music.’ ”

Over time, he says, the new music establishment learned to be more open. “I think now that we have total freedom,” he says “It’s a good time to be a composer.”

By this point Del Aguila has been making music long enough--and with enough momentum--to recognize his own creative behavior patterns, as well as an essential restlessness.

“To me, writing music is like having children, creating something being born out of nothing and out of you. But I think I would be a terrible parent, because I don’t like my oldest children,” he says, laughing. “My Toccata for orchestra is being performed everywhere, probably because it’s a loud, five-minute piece and it’s a good show-off opportunity for a bouncing and jumping conductor. Every conductor calls to tell me they’re doing it, and I say, ‘I’ve written so many other pieces. . . . ‘ I get tired of things I wrote a long time ago.

“I am a composer, and my only interest is just to write and, every once in a while, to play it also. My mind always goes off to the next thing,” he says. “I guess it’s a need.”

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“CLOCKS,” Cuarteto Latinoamericano with Miguel del Aguila, Ventura City Hall, 501 Poli St. Date: Saturday, 10 a.m. Price: $24 Phone: (888) 882-VCMF.