COMPOSER DAVID OCKER SHIFTS MODE

“Clarinetists are organizers,” claims David Ocker, a clarinetist who is also a composer and who demonstrates his achievement in both occupations in a New Music America ’85 event Wednesday afternoon at 5 at the Arnold Schoenberg Institute at USC.

By way of documentation, the bearded musician points to his several years’ service as general factotum of the Independent Composers Assn., and his seven-year employment as copyist/librarian/computer programmer by another active composer, Frank Zappa.

For the time being, however, Ocker has put musical administration behind him.

“All those years, people thought of me as the guy who worked for Frank, and who ran the ICA. Now, I’m thought of as the guy who plays the clarinet, and composes. That makes me happy.”

In his previous mode, Ocker was frustrated. “I would find myself, in the morning, going past the clarinet, going past the piano (where I compose, sometimes), right to the typewriter. One day, I decided I was on the wrong path.”

The stocky, bushy-haired musician says he is not your typical composer-performer. That person, Ocker explains, plays his or her own music exclusively.

“I call myself a composer-interpreter--meaning, I compose my own music, but, as a performer, I interpret the music of other writers, and occasionally my own. There’s a big difference.”

He still also works as a free-lance copyist. “It’s a good, half-time job, and leaves me time to practice and compose. And I like doing it. It keeps me in touch with what other composers are doing. For instance, I recently worked on the new John Adams piece. So, while I was doing the copying, I was also studying the piece. You can learn a lot that way.”

For the third in a series of four, intermissionless matinee concerts at the Arnold Schoenberg Institute, clarinetist Ocker will play eight, short 20th-Century pieces, four of which he calls “historical.”

Music by Eric Dolphy, James Tenney, Donald Martino and William O. Smith, Ocker describes as “music from the ‘60s.” The remaining works, Ocker’s own “At Sixes and Sevens” and “Brahms Allegro,” Arthur Jarvinen’s “Carbon” and John Steinmetz’s “DATACOMP,” are recent examples of works written expressly for the solo clarinet.

The incorporation of computers, synthesizers and other electronic sound-makers into recent compositions will only increase, says Ocker, who says he was, when a graduate student at CalArts, the first musician there to complete a work on the synthesizer.

“It’s inevitable: More and more technology is already replacing live players. Drum-machines (machines which produce the sounds of drums) are beginning to outsell drum sets.

“The only disturbing thing in all this is the implication that you don’t have to be a musician to use the synthesizer, or any other sound-producing gadget. If we follow this implication, we’re all in trouble.”