Movie Music in the Keys of Youth and Range : Composer: At 26, Cliff Eidelman finds himself in demand for scoring films that range from concentration-camp sagas to comedic romps.

When he was in the fourth grade at Hawthorne Elementary School in Beverly Hills, Cliff Eidelman remembers, he headlined in a band during school dances. In ninth grade, years before he could have gotten in as a paying customer, he was writing songs and playing lead guitar onstage at local rock clubs such as the Troubadour.

Now 26, Eidelman was still the youngest in the room on a recent day on a Warner Bros. studio sound stage, where he was conducting a 65-piece orchestra through his score for “Delirious.” The music for the John Candy comedy, due for release in spring, marks Eidelman’s 11th composing assignment since he was old enough to legally drink. And when he’s not busy writing music for such diversely themed motion pictures as “Triumph of the Spirit” and “Crazy People,” he is spearheading a 1991 American Cancer Society fund-raiser. Eidelman will conduct a program of film music--including some of his own compositions--next summer at the Hollywood Bowl.

Intense, enthusiastic and gangly, Eidelman seems a bit like Mozart might have been if he had been raised in California as part of the Pepsi Generation. Eidelman can theorize on his lunch break about how he avoids using synthesizers in his music because “synths don’t feel ,” then turn around the next moment and ask the waitress, “Do you have, like, carbohydrate things?,” explaining that “waving your arms around for eight hours” requires lots of energy. He may be one of Hollywood’s youngest working composers--perhaps the youngest working composer--but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t act his age.

“My age works both for and against me,” he explained on a break during the “Delirious” scoring, between bites of a high-carb pasta salad. “With directors that have been around for a while and have worked with really famous people in the past, they look at me and think of themselves at that age and think, ‘My God, would I have hired me?’ ”

Eidelman’s combination of youth and versatility is what endeared him to “Delirious” ’ director Tom Mankiewicz.

“I wanted to have a young composer,” said Mankiewicz, who described his film as a Walter Mitty-style fantasy with comic, high-adventure and romantic elements. “And in Cliff’s ‘Crazy People’ score I had heard real humor. I was only worried that he couldn’t handle the lush stuff.” His fears were allayed, Mankiewicz said, after he heard a “tape Cliff had sent me from something called ‘Magdalena.’ I popped in the tape and there was the most glorious romantic cue.”

That romantic music was part of Eidelman’s first film score--a job he landed through a series of events akin to being discovered at Schwab’s. In 1986, he was conducting his own symphony at Santa Monica College, where he did his first two years of college study (he had since transferred to USC, majoring in music composition). One member of the audience was so dazzled he set up a meeting between Eidelman and a filmmaker from Europe, who eventually asked him to score “Magdalena,” starring Nastassja Kinski.

“I consider getting that film a miracle,” said Eidelman. “The reason I got it is because I wrote, like, 12 pieces of music, and the director, who was this passionate woman director, just fell in love with it.”

Eidelman’s second job came about when selections from “Magdalena” aired on Santa Monica College’s public-radio station KCRW, where they were heard by a director who hired him to score the HBO movie “Dead Man Out,” for which Eidelman earned an ACE Award nomination. Since then he has worked steadily--often beating out more established composers by recording a few pieces before he even has the job.

For example, when he was bidding to score “Triumph of the Spirit,” the 1989 film about survival in a World War II concentration camp, he says, “I knew I was up against bigger competition. So the first thing I did was I went to the meeting and popped in a tape. Because music speaks louder than any big name.”