A duet for minor and major

Composer Jeremiah R. Klarman has a crowded and exciting schedule, but a recent afternoon brought something really special: a meeting with the celebrated composer Osvaldo Golijov.

The 13-year-old musician attends the Heath School in Brookline; he also takes violin and piano lessons and performs on both instruments. But he's primarily a composer. The preparatory division at New England Conservatory presented an all-Klarman concert last year, and NPR's popular program about talented young musicians, ''From the Top," has taped one of Klarman's pieces for nationwide broadcast; it airs next Sunday night at 6 on WGBH-FM (89.7). Boston Landmarks Orchestra also recently asked Klarman to orchestrate the dances in his Suite for Piano Quartet for a concert this August.

In addition to the ''From the Top" broadcast, Klarman was chosen to participate in the program's Young Composers Project, which sets up mentoring sessions with major composers. April 18 was Klarman's special day. He was invited to the Brookline studio of Golijov, who -- born in 1960 -- has emerged as the most prominent composer of his generation.

Bespectacled, serious, alternately shy and self-confident, Klarman sports a Beatles-era haircut and dressed up for the occasion, wearing a tie. Golijov was in his working clothes: orange pullover, jeans, and sneakers. The senior composer didn't waste time with formalities and almost immediately asked Klarman to sit next to him at the piano. ''How fast does this go?" he asked about the opening of Klarman's First String Quartet, and right away the four hands of the two composers started playing the first movement.

Golijov treated Klarman as a colleague, not a student. He led off by remarking, ''I hear a few different styles and influences in your music. I'm very cool with that." Golijov is known for his own assimilative style, and before their meeting, Klarman was scanning the shelves. He could have seen musical scores from every period, the complete Beatles catalog, recordings by Miles Davis and Gil Evans, DVDs ranging from Fellini's ''La Strada" to ''Ace Ventura: Pet Detective," copies of ''Don Quixote" and ''War and Peace," books about Picasso, Da Vinci, and Frida Kahlo.

Klarman's music exhibits variety and charm; it embraces both Haydn and klezmer music. He has a genuine melodic gift and can move confidently through various harmonic fields before returning safely home.

Golijov praised all these qualities while making stimulating suggestions that reflect the kind of composer he is himself. ''I can only tell you what I would do in this situation, or what some other composers would have done," he said. ''But I can't tell you what you should do. So you should feel perfectly free to reject my advice."

Mostly Golijov spoke of music as storytelling, of themes and ideas as characters who are as surprising and unpredictable as real people. Then he made suggestions about how to tell the story, how to develop the characters.

He began by wondering why Klarman had put the movements of the string quartet into the order he did. ''To me the last movement sounds more like the first movement," Golijov commented. ''It seems more full of possibilities, and the first movement sounds more like a lively finale. I was a lot older than you before I figured out how to write multi-movement pieces. It's a question of storytelling, of unfolding the story in chapters, of finding the direction things are taking."

Golijov particularly complimented Klarman on a beautiful slow theme but wished he had made more of it. ''With a melody like that," Golijov said, ''you can take us to an entirely different place. But you are still afraid to be without the framework of the accompaniment. Don't be afraid to lose it for a while. The next time you come up with a gorgeous theme like that, you need to decide what else you could do with it, where else you can take it. You need to juggle between the predictable and the surprising, between compression and decompression. If you establish a process, you need to carry it out, but it doesn't have to be like a multiplication table."

Golijov added, ''A theme is like a person. We need to ask how he walks, talks, what his sense of humor is, if he has one. We have to see him running, laughing, crying, the totality of his being and his potential for growth. If you listen to the theme, it will tell you where to go. Listen to what the theme is doing and be prepared to change your mind. Novelists talk all the time about how their characters take on lives of their own, and music is the same way. You need to reconcile what you want to do with what the music wants to do."

Golijov had specific advice about how to accomplish this: Fragment the theme, develop new and contrasting accompaniment figures to create textural and tactile differences, put the theme through different rhythmic paces. ''Rhythms play with your bloodstream," he said. He also recommended ''make believe" -- getting other instruments to sound like a tuba or an accordion. ''Make it more theatrical," he urged. And he offered examples from Beethoven, Mozart, Stravinsky, and a host of other models, including tango pianist Octavio Brunetti. ''Listening to other music can only be good for you," he said.

After an hour's working session, the two exchanged some shop talk. Klarman said, ''I started composing when I was about 6, before I was able to write the music down myself." Both now use the Sibelius computer program for composing, although Golijov cautioned against pushing the playback button too often: ''The beauty of live performance is that people are doing it. An orchestra is 100 souls, a living organism. Bach had the greatest computer of all, but it was in his head."

At the end, Golijov said he was ''moved, impressed, and amazed" by Klarman's talent and early work. ''I am very curious about where you are going to go," he said. ''Don't get scared of anything, and follow your heart so that you are always exploring a new area, doing something new."

A couple of days later, Klarman spoke about the meeting. ''I've never experienced anything like it before. The whole thing was incredible," he said. ''It was all about things I haven't noticed or thought about, but I understood immediately what he was talking about. And I thought, 'That's true.' "