McGurty Charts an Independent Course : Music: Composer even rents chairs for tonight’s concert in Santa Monica.

At 34, Mark McGurty has become that modern rarity: a genuinely independent composer. Not a member of any society or association, not affiliated with any organization or cradled on any campus, McGurty has made a way with his music and a well-practiced musical jack-of-all-tradesmanship.

Tonight, McGurty is presenting a concert of his music at the Santa Monica Art Museum. Typically, he has been involved in everything from finding theater lights and an acoustical shell to renting the chairs.

“I’ve spent most of my life putting on concerts, over 700 concerts, I think. . . . The whole act of creation does not end with drawing the double bar,” McGurty says, repeating what has become the first lesson of musical Realpolitik. “It’s very important to stay active.”

The repertory tonight consists of McGurty’s two Piano Sonatas, the premiere of the “Anniversary Album for Solo Violin,” a chamber version of the “Anatole Cycle,” plus the Phantasy for flute and piano and Four Songs for soprano and piano.

“My old piano sonata is abrasive,” McGurty says. “As a piano piece, it doesn’t portray the long lines of most of my music.

“The new piano piece (which was given its premiere performance Sunday in Oregon by Bryan Pezzone, who will play it tonight) is more sonorous, more concerned with long lines. It’s more like the later works of Beethoven. There is much more preoccupation with harmonies, counterpoint and rhythmic energies. It is also flashy.”

In recent years, composition for McGurty has been a search “to find a balance between the technical possibilities and what I sincerely want to express, and to find something flattering for the performer. . . . The first thing in my mind is to be as expressive as possible.”

The composer, not surprisingly, says that he is very particular about how his music is played. The “Anniversary Album” was written as a 10th-anniversary surprise for McGurty’s wife, Cynthia, who will play it tonight. McGurty counts the rest of the performers as friends who have extensively rehearsed his music.

McGurty was born in New Jersey and trained at Juilliard, where his principal composition teachers were David Diamond and Elliott Carter. From there, he and his wife went to Venezuela, where he was orchestra manager and she a violinist for the Orquesta Filarmonica de Caracas from 1979-83. McGurty then went to the Dominican Republic, where he worked for the National Opera.

He came here, he says, because “I saw a higher level of new-music enterprises springing up in Los Angeles than in New York City. All of the things that we came out to do didn’t work out, but other things did.”

Leonard Stein, director of the Schoenberg Institute, was McGurty’s introduction to the Los Angeles music community. Through circumstance and a network of old and new friendships, McGurty has been associated with several Southland ex-music directors.

For a year he was orchestra manager for Roger Wagner and the Master Chorale and Sinfonia, and then he worked for Keith Clark and the Pacific Symphony, where he was “everything from orchestra manager to bottle washer and composer-in-residence.” He is also a friend of Murry Sidlin, late of the Long Beach Symphony, of which Cynthia McGurty is a member.

By his estimation, McGurty produced more than 90 concerts for the Pacific Symphony during Clark’s heyday. At the same time, his music was being played from Poland to Japan and throughout Latin America. “My own creative life got so busy that I couldn’t continue in that job,” he says.

Now he works as a free-lance composer and record producer, running out of his new Santa Clarita tract house a musical cottage industry that employs two other people full time. “There’s a lot of interest in my music now, and I’m making money on it.”

Among McGurty’s activities is music copying, where his customers include the Journal of the Schoenberg Institute. Copying work--which for composers is the equivalent of taking in laundry--is a sore point for McGurty and many others, to the point that it is now a key issue in many commissions.

A performance in June for the Chamber Music in Historic Sites Catalina Festival of a new short piece by McGurty fell through because of an apparent misunderstanding about providing money for copying the work. The absence of a formal commission agreement and funds for the copying left McGurty believing the project was off, while the Da Camera Society continued to expect the work.

“Somebody has to pay for that time (for copying), and it’s usually me,” McGurty says, a plaint many other composers have echoed.

From now until April, however, McGurty’s working day is his own. His principal occupation is “The Passion of Pier Paolo Pasolini,” commissioned by the Long Beach Opera, for which he composed the music for last season’s “The Guilty Mother.” The libretto is based on a play by McGurty’s friend Stan Thomas dealing with events during post-production of the Italian director’s last film, when he was murdered.

The play has not been produced, according to McGurty, because of its subject matter: “an indictment against the film industry, homosexuality and violence.”

“I have a certain ability for dealing with language,” McGurty says. “The Pasolini thing we are working on now is a multilingual extravaganza. I’m very interested in theater pieces where many things happen simultaneously.”