Mozart Inspires Winner : Music: Composer’s chamber music piece, ‘Celestial Mechanics,’ finishes second in a prestigious national competition.

When La Canada Flintridge composer Donald Crockett sat in the Kennedy Center in Washington last week listening to a performance of a modern piece called “Celestial Mechanics,” he could almost see Mozart sitting among the stars.

That’s because the image of Mozart had inspired Crockett when he wrote the piece that received one of the Kennedy Center’s prestigious Friedheim awards for musical composition last week.

For 10 years, Crockett, currently a composer in residence for the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, has been gaining prestige in Los Angeles composing circles.

But, he said he considers winning second place in the Friedheim competition “an affirmation of what I am doing as a composer.”

Crockett’s mother was a professional pianist, and he is married to a pianist. Crockett, 40, has been composing almost nonstop since he wrote a set of piano pieces when he was 15 and then some works for singing groups with which he was involved.

In the last decade, he has written for the Los Angeles Philharmonic in addition to the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and other groups.

Times music critic Daniel Cariaga, in an April review of another Crockett piece, called “Melting Voices,” wrote that the composer’s “characteristic style is marked by an unfailing sense of dramatic continuity and motivation. In whatever medium, he communicates clearly and strongly with a kind of atonal and pungent musical diction that one can only call mainstream.”

Crockett, who works in a music studio built into his garage, said that in every piece he is “delving into emotional states, but also exploring purely musical ideas.”

Now, Crockett, who also teaches music as USC, is making his mark on the national music scene as well.

Crockett learned in September that his “Celestial Mechanics”--a chamber music piece written for an oboe and a string quartet--was one of four pieces selected from 146 entries to win a Friedheim, one of the top honors in the country for composers.

Last weekend, the four finalists were played in a concert at the Kennedy Center. Crockett’s piece was ranked second. He won a prize of $2,500, but more importantly, he said, he has seen a surge of interest in his work.

Three groups have scheduled performances of “Celestial Mechanics”--the 20th Century Consort, a chamber music group in Minneapolis and another group that will play it in Taipei.

“I’m thrilled,” he said. “It’s satisfying to have my music make an impact.”

The 17-minute piece was written on commission for the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra’s Mozart Festival, and was completed in March, 1991, after about six months of work.

Crockett said the music was inspired by listening to the chamber group’s rehearsal of Mozart’s Oboe Quartet. He was particularly interested in the relationship between the oboe and the string instruments--a violin, viola and cello--in the Mozart piece, and he decided to explore that relationship further in his own work.

He named the composition “Celestial Mechanics” because, while he was composing, he had an image of Mozart “on some stars pulling the strings.”

But Crockett acknowledges that “it is certainly fair to say it sounds nothing like Mozart.”