Completing the Composer’s Picture

When pianist Steven Niles saw a gap in the Los Angeles classical music scene, he decided to ante up his own money to fill it.

“Los Angeles is a good city for new music generally, but there was nothing here like this--a composer portrait series,” Niles said in a recent interview from his home in Simi Valley. “The idea is to feature an evening of one composer’s works, sometimes two.”

Niles’ idea blossomed into Music of Changes, a five-concert series, named after a work by John Cage, that ends its first season Thursday with a program devoted to New York composer Roberto Sierra.

Niles, who functions as both the artistic director and the executive director, is all of 26, a piano performance major doing graduate work at USC’s Thornton School, where he’s studying with soloist and longtime USC professor Daniel Pollack. Pollack is on the Music of Changes board, which also includes composers (George Crumb, Rodion Shchedrin, Lalo Schifrin, for instance ) musicians (pianist Raymond Beegle) and one critic (Alan Rich of the LA Weekly). The budget is about $30,000.

“My family is not affluent,” Niles said. “I just put in my life savings, though I didn’t expect to. I discovered after I committed that the first two years of nonprofit organizations are very difficult for fund-raising. People want to see a track record.”

To pick the composers, Niles announced a competition at about 1,000 music schools and through the American Music Center, a New York-based national service organization for new music.

“The competition does two things for us,” Niles said. “It gives us a broad sampling of all the music out there and also it helps us fund-raise. We charge an application fee of $40. That’s enough to put on one concert.”

He decided to ask each composer for one piece scored for the ensemble of instruments based on the set Schoenberg used for “Pierrot Lunaire”--flute, clarinet, piano, violin, viola, cello and voice, plus percussion and up to two other performers. Niles and colleagues from USC and CalArts perform the music.

“We chose that instrumentation because of its versatility and because so many new pieces are scored for that kind of ensemble,” Niles said. “The piece could be a solo or something for the entire ensemble or some denomination of it. There was no time limit for a piece.”

The call for entries yielded 102 scores, often with sample recordings, from seven countries. “We didn’t pay much attention to the bios,” said Niles, who judged the entries along with other board members. “Mainly, we just listened, with an eye to which pieces would make for a good overall concert, an entire concert, based on our subjective sense.

“There was a wide range of different styles and forms. We were struck by the amount of melodrama. There was a certain amount of atonal music, it’s not exactly serial. And a lot of neo-tonal music and everything in between.

“We were very impressed, in general. The overall level of competence seemed to be very high. It was difficult to choose. But there was something about each of these composers who stood out.”

The series opened in October with the music of French-born Philippe Bodin and continued with British-born Peter Child (December), British-Australian composer Chris Dench (February) and Colombian composer Alba Potes (April).

“In the case of Roberto Sierra,” Niles said, “one of the things that impressed us was that all his pieces seemed to be so balanced in their structure. They all seemed to be the perfect length.”

For the series’ concerts, Music of Changes also commissioned a new work from each composer. Sierra’s new piece is called “Turner,” after the English painter.

“Turner has always fascinated me because of his use of color and his wild imagery,” the Puerto Rico-born Sierra said recently from Ithaca, N.Y., where he has lived since joining the faculty of Cornell University in 1992.

“I based each one of the sections in this piece on one of his paintings. I had a painting in front of me and tried to derive the inspiration for the harmonies, the rhythms and the colors from the paintings.

“Music is more abstract than the visual arts and a more private thing in the end than anything else. But a point of departure is Turner’s paintings, and I hope that translates into the music.”

Other Sierra works on the program will include “Concionero Sefardi,” the piece he submitted for the competition, and “Piezas Imaginarias,” “Ritmorroto” and Cello Sonata.

“Winning the competition was a pleasant surprise,” Sierra said. “I had forgotten I had submitted the piece. I always move onto the new work. I wrote this awhile ago. But this is an interesting group from the standpoint of a composer. They have a very reasonable board.”

Music of Changes is filming all the concerts, and the footage will be edited into a single program set to air in July on the Ovation, Knowledge and Wisdom networks, which have limited cable and satellite availability in Los Angeles.

“Audience development has been difficult but steady,” Niles said. “We’ve had the concerts on different nights every time. We are beginning to discover which days of the week are best. Thursday seems to be the good day, so far.” The idea is to offer the series every two years, with a new competition determining the participants for each season.

“But it depends entirely on funding,” Niles said. “If we can raise funding sufficiently to do it, we will announce a new competition in October.”

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Chris Pasles is a Times staff writer.

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MUSIC OF ROBERTO SIERRA, Zipper Hall, Colburn School of Performing Arts, 200 S. Grand Ave., L.A. Date: Thursday, 8 p.m. Price: $10. Phone: (310) 205-2637.