Composer Lazarof Prefers to Play It By Ear : Music: Although he’s inspired by Stravinsky and Schoenberg, he belongs to his own school of composition.

Henri Lazarof, composer, teacher and longstanding music personality of the Los Angeles area, doesn’t like to talk in too much detail about musical philosophies. Although a prolific composer of orchestral and chamber music, he prefers to make down-to-earth observations instead of change-the-earth ones.

“Tours are an enormous headache,” he acknowledged when asked about the program of his recent compositions currently on a U.S. tour performed by members of the Chamber Music/LA Festival Ensemble. The tour, which began Wednesday night in San Francisco, includes a performance tonight at Schoenberg Hall, UCLA.

On the program are four of Lazarof’s chamber compositions written within the last four years. The composer appears on the program, conducting two of the works, an octet and sextet. The tour then moves to Boston on Saturday and concludes in New York City on Sunday.

Lazarof talked about his music in the guest house of his Bel-Air mansion a few blocks north of the Westwood campus. Equipped with a piano, rare art works and a colorful view of his garden outside, the building is used for the sole purpose of Lazarof’s work space, where he spends a great deal of his time at the piano, or penciling out his ideas on an antique reading table.

“There is an umbilical cord that runs through these four works, but they should not be considered the total oeuvre of a composer,” he said.

“I guess like anyone else I have been inspired by the masters of this century, Stravinsky and Schoenberg, but I have never been a part of any school or philosophy of composition.”

Lazarof was born 57 years ago in Sofia, Bulgaria. He was an immigrant to Israel after World War II and a student of Goffredo Petrassi in Rome in the mid-1950s. Lazarof is now professor emeritus of composition at UCLA, where he has taught for 30 years. Although he admittedly finds much inspiration for composing from his travels to Europe and elsewhere, he spends most of his time at home, where he lives with his wife, Janice, the daughter of local arts patron S. Mark Taper.

He would not talk about his marriage, insisting it wasn’t important as far as his music is concerned. But he did volunteer information about many of his activities, including the current tour, which he is careful to point out exists solely on its own merits, funded by grants from various foundations and other outside sources. Yukiko Kamei, artistic director of Chamber Music/LA, has given the premieres and performed several of Lazarof’s works since the late 1960s. “He (Lazarof) knows us all very well and writes according to our talents and abilities,” she says.

“He has a perfect balance between craftsmanship and beauty.

“Our ensemble does not concertize together very often, but because we are mostly former students or associates of the master classes of Jascha Heifetz and Gregor Piatigorsky, we have no trouble blending with each other.”

Kamei, who is expecting a child, is not touring with the group this time. Musicians on the tour will be violinists Nina Bodnar, Gilles Apap, Yoko Matsuda and Peter Marsh; violists Milton Thomas and Paul Silverthorne; cellists Jeffrey Solow and David Speltz, and pianist Jerome Lowenthal.

Another recent project of Lazarof’s has been two CDs of his music, one released in July, the other this month. According to Herschel Burke Gilbert, owner of the Laurel Record label under which the recording was made, this latest offering with Gerard Schwarz conducting the L.A. Chamber Orchestra was one of the biggest and most costly projects every attempted by the small record company. The cost of the project was almost $30,000.

In general, Lazarof’s music utilizes meticulous motivic writing to create simple and complex textures in a free, atonal style. He usually writes for musicians whom he knows well enough to explore boundaries of each separate technique. To date, he has written several works for members of the Chamber Music/LA Festival Ensemble, as well as flutist James Galway, cellist Nathaniel Rosen and the late pianist-composer John Ogdon.

“Knowledge doesn’t disappear and there will always be battles,” he said. “I’m neither for or against anything, be it neo-Romanticism, minimalism or serialism.

“Composers have spoken too much about music. I think this does a disservice to the field. Everyone is talking too much and it doesn’t explain anything to the general public. When there is more justification than information, then that implies something is wrong.”