Composer Does His Homework in Music History : Education: Leonard Rosenman uses his living room to lead a no-cost, no-credit, all-fun class on the beauty of music.

In a steely and stressful time, geopolitically speaking, it is curiously refreshing to step aside for an evening or several, and contemplate the course of musical beauty from the 14th Century forward.

Composer Leonard Rosenman’s cathedral-ceilinged living room has a grand piano flanked by a pair of hi-fi speakers capable of raising the dead. There is on one side of the room an open stairway and an open mezzanine. Both, toward 8 o’clock of a Wednesday evening, are well-populated, like the living room itself.

Rosenman takes a last sip of red wine, commands his three-dozen attendees to silence, and begins to talk about Richard Wagner. For 45 minutes, Rosenman talks eloquently about Wagner’s departures from the musical past. He plays themes on the piano, plays the prelude to “Das Rheingold” at full volume so that it is both felt and heard. He reads reviews (scathing) of Wagner’s work. (So much for critics.)

The crowd adjourns to the kitchen for coffee and cookies and then Rosenman talks again for 45 minutes, fielding questions and steering discussions about Wagner, about all music, about the impact of the Industrial Revolution and other external forces on composers and audiences, about the growing personal and emotive content of music.

The sessions began more than a year ago when Rosenman lived in Malibu and was newly remarried, to producer Judy Campbell. She knew more about her husband than about his music and considered taking a course in music history at UCLA. A friend of hers wondered if Rosenman couldn’t do it himself just as well. He has taught theory and composition at USC and elsewhere and he thought he could.

“I started with 14th-Century chants,” Rosenman said before a recent session. “Now we’re into the 20th Century and I’m going to invite some of my composer friends to join us. That should be lively.”

The group, which started with only half a dozen of his wife’s friends in attendance, has grown by word of mouth and now attracts as many as four-dozen listeners, friends of friends of friends. The regulars include an eye surgeon who also plays concert-quality piano, an ad agency owner, actors (the Leonard Nimoys, the Arte Johnsons) and actresses (Joan Chen of “Twin Peaks” and “The Last Emperor”), models, producers and other professionals.

“No cost (except to me; my wine bill has gone up considerably), no credit, no attendance-taking, no homework, just pleasure and maybe a new way of listening to music,” Rosenman says.

Rosenman began a career in film scoring with “East of Eden.” One of his piano students, James Dean (for a short time before success distracted him), brought him to the attention of director Elia Kazan. He also scored “Rebel Without a Cause” and such subsequent films as “The Chapman Report” and “Fantastic Voyage.” He won Oscars for “Barry Lyndon” and “Bound for Glory” and most recently wrote the music for “RoboCop 2.”

He has also written a good deal of music for television, with Emmys for “Sybil” and “Friendly Fire.”

The son of a Brooklyn grocer, Rosenman first thought of being a painter, although he also studied piano. Hearing Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring,” he once said, persuaded him that there was much to be said for composition. He studied with Roger Sessions at Berkeley, with Luigi Dallapiccola and, briefly, with Arnold Schoenberg.

The way of the serious composer is not easy anywhere, the supply of patron princes being in short supply, and most composers teach, not always happily. “They couldn’t survive without the university, though most would be ecstatic to be liberated from it.” Rosenman has taught a lot, never so cheerfully as in the present gig.

Film and television composers are nicely paid, but it has historically been hard for them to be taken seriously thereafter, outside film and television, whatever their origins. “It’s not true elsewhere in the world, but in this country, yes,” Rosenman says. “It can make you schizophrenic.”

Up to 1953, he had had five major performances of his works, he says. After he wrote his first film score in 1954, it was 20 years before he enjoyed another major performance. Now, after the long, slow time, he appears to enjoy the best of both worlds.

He is working hard to finish orchestrating a 40-minute violin concerto commissioned by the National Orchestra in Washington. It will be performed by William Steck, the orchestra’s concertmaster, with Mstislav Rostropovich conducting.

He also has a commission from the Kronos -uartet for a work for them and this week was asked by the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Holland to write a concerto for its principal oboist.

His serious work tended to be austere and intellectual, as if to demarcate it sharply from the more accessible, narrative music he was writing for the media. (Ironically, along with Alex North and Bernard Herrmann, Rosenman gets credit for helping to lead film music away from the massive, blanketing, post-Tchaikovsky sounds that characterized the Max Steiner-Dmitri Tiomkin era.)

Now, in the last few years, Rosenman says, “I’ve been going back to my original ideas, back to the kind of music I was making in the early ‘50s, back to tonality.” His work during the lean years, he says, “was hard as nails, 12-tone exercises. My wife calls it my root-canal music. The violin concerto will surprise people, I think. I don’t worry about the old 12-tone problem, what note do I write next.”

Rosenman took up tennis at 50 and skiing at 60. “It seemed to me that the way I was going, I was using my head more and more and my body less and less, and if I kept on my body was going to shrink and my head would expand so I’d end up looking like a Martian.” He looks admirably symmetrical.

It pleases him that the regulars at his soirees in the Hollywood hills occasionally now catch him. “I played the last Beethoven quartet and carried on about the two themes. One of the women said, ‘I think you’re wrong. There’s only one theme and a variation.’ I said, ‘My God, you’re right.’ ”