CONCERT TO PREMIERE COMPOSER’S ‘AGES’ SUITE

Not every contemporary composer experiments with dissonance, strange new instruments or arcane theories. Daniel Robbins, whose “Suite for the Ages of Life” will be premiered by Larry Granger and the South Coast Symphony on Saturday, prides himself on writing serious music that is “unashamedly tonal.”

“Tonality is important enough to stay around for as long as music is around,” Robbins said in a recent interview.

“I started writing serial, atonal and avant-garde music while working on a master’s at USC,” said Robbins, who graduated from the University of Southern California in 1976. “You have to do that in an academic situation because you’re writing for their degree. But for me, there was no artistic satisfaction in that kind of music.”

Robbins, 38, credits Hungarian-American composer Miklos Rozsa, with whom he studied privately during his USC years, for helping him “become the composer I am.”

“Mr. Rozsa exerted a powerful influence on my music, both in terms of writing for an orchestra and in the language of music,” Robbins said.

“He was very instrumental in making me realize that you should write in the way you’re strongest, rather than merely in a style because it’s fashionable. I was naturally slanted to tonalism--and had the most to say in it.”

Robbins derived his “Suite for the Ages of Life” from a ballet he composed in 1977 for a troupe of seven dancers working with Robbins, choreographer Albert Ruiz and librettist Sonya Newberg.

The action of the ballet--which was never performed because the troupe disbanded--traced the stages in the development of personality as formulated by psychoanalyst Erik Erikson.

“We literally went through a synopsis of his (Erikson’s) theories of psychological conflicts,” Robbins said. “Erikson had organized the development of personality in stages from infancy to old age around polarities: Trust vs. Mistrust, Initiative vs. Guilt, Industry vs. Inferiority.

“We pulled what was central to his theories, and set each like a tableau.”

Despite its reliance on Erikson’s theories, the original choreography was not excessively literal--nor was his music, Robbins said.

“I never felt I was being literal in depicting physical action, other than in the rhythms and the emotional charge of the music,” Robbins said.

“The piece originally was a group of piano impromptus and in that form, rarely could be used directly. I had to make changes in mood and movement. But a tune exists, I believe, away from the fact that it accompanies a dance character at a particular stage of development.”

Robbins wrote the ballet in six months and took another six months to cut the music from 20 minutes to 10 for the Suite, keeping only “passages that made sense away from the choreography” and jettisoning “portions which would throw the balance of the form off.”

Robbins, who teaches privately and also occasionally at various local colleges, began his association with conductor Larry Granger in 1978 when Granger led the Southeast Youth Symphony Orchestra in the composer’s “In Memoriam Robert F. Kennedy,” written while working with Rozsa in 1972. (Now in its 14th year, the Youth Orchestra is sponsored by Costa Mesa-based South Coast Symphony.)

“Larry called me last December and said he was trying to schedule a premiere--and did I have something? That’s the best compliment a composer can have.”

Granger wanted a work, Robbins said, that “was not avant-garde, not atonal and had a direct language in terms of audience appeal.”

Granger, speaking by phone, said: “I’ve always been impressed with Robbins’ compositions. His music is composed in fairly strict form, but the melodies themselves have a flavor of Romanticism, even though the orchestrations are not thick or lush.

“It’s good contemporary writing without being so heavy that it can’t be understood upon a first hearing.”

The 8:15 concert in the Robert B. Moore Theater at Orange Coast College also will include Schubert’s Symphony No. 5 in B-flat and Dvorak’s Cello Concerto, with soloist John Walz.