Mackey’s ‘Big Bang’ Will Be Heard Sunday

In these days of music made to order, when inspiration waits on commission, it may be refreshing to hear a piece written simply for its own reasons. “I just decided I wanted to write an orchestra piece,” Steven Mackey says of “The Big Bang and Beyond.”

He found a practical use for the 20-minute work, however, submitting it as his doctoral dissertation at Brandeis University. Sunday at Royce Hall, the Los Angeles Philharmonic Institute Orchestra and conducting fellow Kirk Muspratt will give “The Big Bang and Beyond” its first performance, with the composer in attendance.

The piece began, Mackey says, “as a personal image in my mind. I had a sound in my head that nothing other than an orchestra could do.” Mackey describes it in terms of small worlds, or states of being, emerging from cosmic storms--hence the title.

Stylistically, “The Big Bang” mediates between the dense counterpoint of his earlier music--such as the string quartet that the Lydian Quartet played here during the Olympic Arts Festival in 1984--and the more colorful and expressive compositions that followed, the composer says.

“It’s on a grand scale, the ideas are big ideas,” Mackey says. “I’ve slowed down the harmonic rhythm, so the music grabs you by the collar, rather than sitting back and asking you to bring a microscope to it.”

The 32-year-old composer, now on the faculty at Princeton University, was born in Germany. His father’s career as a civil servant took the family to Guam, Mexico and England, where Mackey started school. He was trained as a guitarist--”I grew up as a rock-and-roller,”--and lutenist at UC Davis before going on to SUNY and Brandeis.

Mackey began “The Big Bang” at Tanglewood in 1984; John Harbison was the composer-in-residence. “I would play and hum and gesticulate passages for him as it evolved,” Mackey says.

It is Harbison’s interest that brings “The Big Bang” to Los Angeles at this time. The Pulitzer Prize winner and former Philharmonic composer-in-residence will conduct Schoenberg’s Variations for Orchestra, Opus 31, Sunday. Harbison’s own “Elegiac Songs” to texts by Emily Dickinson, sung by mezzo Gloria Raymond and conducted by Anne Harrigan, completes the program.

Four years ago, Mackey had time for relatively spontaneous projects such as “The Big Bang.” “Now, I have the next two or three years of my life laid out,” he says. Mackey is just finishing a piece for the Kronos Quartet and soprano Dawn Upshaw, with three other commissions, one for the California E.A.R. Unit, due.

“About one orchestra piece to every three or four chamber pieces is the ratio I’d like,” Mackey reports. “Writing for orchestra is a big investment in time, in a lot of clerical ways.”

Because he is a teacher, time for composing is not always in ready supply. “You really have to want to do it, you have to make time while you’re teaching,” Mackey says. “My house is a mess, and I don’t always remember to do the little things, like paying the bills. I have to make myself get up and compose every morning.”