Controlled chaos

Many teenagers possess a special talent for feeling like a single song or album has changed their lives. In most cases the impact is as fleeting as it is sensational, but not for composer Lee Hyla. He grew up in the Midwest, an altar boy who dutifully studied the piano and thought about becoming a priest. Then came a series of seismic jolts.

First were the Rolling Stones and James Brown, both of which electrified him. He immediately pledged his keyboard skills to the nobler aim of starting a rock band. Then at age 18 he experienced a one-two punch from which he has never really recovered: the explosive free jazz of Cecil Taylor and the complexly probing Cello Sonata of Elliott Carter. A solid dose of late Beethoven was the coup de grace. At that point, Hyla had been studying religion at Indiana University but he packed his bags and came to Boston's New England Conservatory. It was time to become a composer.

More than three decades later, Hyla, 54, is still here, now running the composition department at NEC. In the intervening years, he has found a way to weld his early passions for rock, improvisation, classical, and avant-garde music into a bold compositional voice that on the surface sounds not a bit like any of them.

His music wrestles extremes of sound and energy into a form of sagely controlled chaos. It is packed with brainy structures and rigorous forms, but at its best it hurls through space with the visceral immediacy of the genres that first sparked his imagination. Moments of surprising beauty arrive like clearings in a forest. He is an uptown composer with a downtown soul, a 12-tone rebel who never gave up on modernism. He is also still something of a local secret; his work is well-respected and frequently performed in the thriving new music communities of Boston and New York but it has yet to find the wider audience it deserves.

That may be changing. The word on Hyla not only seems to be spreading, but the composer will soon be leaving town to take up an endowed chair in composition at Northwestern University. Before then, he will receive a generous send-off with two free all-Hyla programs, on Jan. 30 in Jordan Hall and on March 31 at the Longy School of Music. His works will also be performed by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (March 22 ) and Boston Musica Viva (May 4 ). Those who don't want to wait can dip into "Wilson's Ivory-bill," an excellent new CD of Hyla's music out on John Zorn's Tzadik label.

A few weeks ago the composer sat in his sparsely furnished office at NEC, his baseball cap and longish silver-white hair lending him a mellow air. He is unassuming and soft-spoken in conversation, and one almost senses a disconnect between the gentle demeanor of the man and the expressive urgency of his music. But when Hyla slid over to the piano at one point to demonstrate a passage, the two instantly came together. He laid into his own piece -- "Dream of Innocent III" -- with utter conviction and near ferocity, hinting at the rocker and free improviser he once was, even shouting out percussion lines in order to give a listener a fuller sense of the score.

The playing certainly helped get his point across, especially since, as he freely admits, his music is extremely hard to describe. "I'm happily not part of any particular -ism," he said. "There was a time around eight years ago that I vowed that in every piece I was going to write, I had to do something I'd never done before. I was trying to expand my language because I felt it was possible that I could become too narrow. And that worked. But my aesthetic is my aesthetic and it goes from piece to piece."

That highly individual and elusive quality may be part of what prompted Zorn, the avant-garde saxophonist and composer , to hesitate when asked to discuss Hyla's music. "What Lee is doing has a magic that I don't like to see despoiled by having it put into a box that people can close with a lock and say , ' I know what that is, ' " he said by phone from New York. Instead, Zorn offered the qualities he seeks in good music: "I look for honesty, I look for imagination, I look for craft, and I look for passion -- a kind of cathartic intensity. Lee has all four of those things, and very few people do."

The striking originality of Hyla's music has not come without struggle. He was educated at a time when 12-tone music still dominated the American academy, and young composers felt pressure to write in academic styles. As he deepened his formal training, first as an undergraduate at NEC and then as a master's student at SUNY Stony Brook, he felt himself losing access to his own musical voice. He abandoned graduate school shy of his doctorate, headed to Toronto, and formed a rock band called Klo. But there was no turning back the clock to an earlier moment in his musical life.

"We were a pretty bad band," he admitted. "The musicians were great but all of us had gotten master's degrees in composition, and trying to play rock 'n' roll just seemed like a disconnect. We knew too much about all this other stuff."

So Hyla scrapped the band and headed to New York City. It was the early '80s, and he moved into a big loft in the East Village for $350 a month and worked part-time in a bookstore to pay the bills. Many evenings were spent at the Knitting Factory, the then-fabled Houston Street hothouse of downtown experimental music. He was also trying to compose, but he kept second-guessing himself at every turn. A piece called "Pre-Amnesia" for solo saxophone lasts roughly 90 seconds, but it took about five months to write. A single measure of his "In Double Light" cost him nearly half a year.

"I think I was having such a hard time because I knew all these musics were equally important to me, and I couldn't find a way to reconcile them," Hyla said. Minimalism was one obvious solution in the air at the time, but for Hyla, this pop-inflected repetitive language lacked a basic harmonic tension that he saw as essential. He was seeking a blend of uptown and downtown influences at once more edgy and rigorous. He longed to capture the anarchic spirit of punk rock but his ear was too sophisticated to simply quote guitar riffs or crank up the volume of his string quartets.

Finally the dam broke in 1984, when he wrote a piece called "Pre-Pulse Suspended" for 12 instruments. "I was able to clarify how the energy of rock 'n' roll could come into notated classical music, how to get that energy unencumbered with extra intellectual baggage. The intellectual stuff is all still there, but it had shed its weight."

"Pre-Pulse" opens with a rush of sound, a caterwauling duo for violin and bass clarinet. As the piece unfolds, the music seems to move at many speeds at once; quick shifts in direction have the effect of jump cuts on film. Like much of Hyla's later music, it is a lean, rugged work full of expressionistic, dissonant gestures. But despite its challenging language, it comes off not with the tweediness of an academic exercise but with the power and insistence of a lapel-grabbing Cecil Taylor solo.

The violinist Wilma Smith, then a member of the Lydian String Quartet, heard the premiere of "Pre-Pulse" at Tanglewood and immediately approached Hyla asking for tapes of his other music. She brought them to her quartet and the group commissioned Hyla right away for a string quartet to play on their upcoming New York recital. He joined the faculty of New England Conservatory in 1992, the same year that he met his future wife, the painter Katherine Desjardins. He has lived locally since that time, and has received many commissions from Boston-area performers and ensembles.

The cellist Rhonda Rider, formerly in the Lydian quartet and now a member of Triple Helix, has performed a lot of Hyla's music over the years. "Wilson's Ivory-bill" opens with Rider's cello solo in Hyla's Fourth Quartet erupting from the speakers.

"You really have a very physical feeling when you're playing it," she said recently. "It not only takes you to another landscape but puts you right there in the moment. We would often program his music with Beethoven. They share an immediacy. It's as if the music is being written right in the instance that you're hearing it."

Conductor Gil Rose and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project have recorded two all-Hyla CDs (the second is due out in the fall). Rose calls Hyla's 1996 work "Trans" the "hardest 20 minutes of music I've ever conducted." He also singled out a certain integrity and authenticity that characterized Hyla's approach: "He's going to write pieces about things he believes in," Rose said.

That sense of conviction has led Hyla down pathways that build off his extra-musical interests, including the history of religion, and bird - watching. In 2000, he wrote "Wilson's Ivory-bill," an absorbing setting of an obscure 19th-century ornithological text about the capture of a feisty ivory-billed woodpecker, a giant bird whose noble bearing and supposed extinction later granted it near-mythological status among birders and environmentalists. The first sounds you hear in the piece are from the woodpecker itself, taken from a 1935 field recording.

Hyla has also set a text you are more likely to have heard of: Allen Ginsberg's epic poem "Howl." The Kronos Quartet recorded the piece in 1995 with Ginsberg himself narrating it. The work is a showstopper, just waiting to be taken up by a young string quartet looking to make a statement.

For all of this success with chamber music and smaller scores, Hyla has not had much luck in receiving commissions for large orchestral pieces. "Orchestras don't seem particularly interested in commissioning me," he said with a laugh. "I'm not sure why -- I actually would love to write for orchestra."

That will no doubt change in time, but it is curious why it's taken so long. One possible answer is that Hyla has eschewed the neo-Romantic approach that other rock-influenced composers such as Christopher Rouse have come to adopt, an approach that many major orchestras have perceived as an easier sell to large audiences. One conductor who you might think would appreciate Hyla's uncompromising modernist language is James Levine, but Levine's top priorities seem to lie with an older generation of composers such as Milton Babbitt and Elliott Carter.

With or without major symphonic commissions, Hyla has enough to keep him busy. He dreams of composing an opera based on the end of Caravaggio's life. He is writing a work for the violinists Midori and Vadim Repin, and a piece for the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, where he'll be a composer in residence next fall. He says he hasn't had time to stay very current in his pop listening, but Neil Young, James Brown , and the early Stones still serve as reference points. (He also likes Captain Beefheart, Lucinda Williams, and Public Enemy.) In his own music, the energy at this point appears to be self-sustaining .

As for leaving Boston, Hyla said it was a difficult choice and that NEC will probably always be his "spiritual home." But the new Northwestern position comes with ample rewards, including more time to compose. It's time he yearns for, even as he speaks openly about the vicissitudes of the creative process.

"When you're composing, you're alone all the time and there is a tremendous struggle to understand your materials. Most of the time it's not a good feeling because it's just so frustrating to put a piece together," he explained. "But the moment when things actually crystallize is one of the most transforming moments I've had as a human being. When you can hold the whole piece in your hand, so to speak, and you understand all the levels and layers, there's a way in which you feel like you're communicating with the music that's been done before you, and music that's still to come. It is a very illuminating moment, a very beautiful moment, actually. You're a couple of feet off the ground."

Jeremy Eichler can be reached at jeichler@globe.com.