Druckman Looks to Heaven for Inspiration : Music: Composer’s dream of ‘super-angels’ nets ‘Seraphic Games.’ Work commissioned by the Orange County Philharmonic Society premieres Saturday.

In the movies, a composer gets a flash of insight and scribbles out a symphony. Or maybe he has a dream, wakes up and pens a concerto. Sometimes, all it takes is one glimpse of a loved one and a song arises in the heart and quickly finds its way onto paper.

Things don’t usually work like that in the real world.

Certainly not among contemporary composers, who may be more likely to talk about stochastic processes or other abstruse mathematical principals rather than flights of inspiration, sniffing the flowers or listening to an inner voice.

But then again, things may be changing.

Jacob Druckman says his new work, “Seraphic Games,” was inspired by a dream. The work was commissioned by the Orange County Philharmonic Society and the Edward Halvajian Family Foundation to celebrate the society’s 30th year of bringing the Los Angeles Philharmonic to Orange County. The orchestra, under Zubin Mehta, will give the premiere of the piece Saturday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

In his dream, Druckman saw “Super-angels . . . creating and destroying entire worlds with the detachment of a chess game,” he said in a press release that describes the work, an eight-minute composition for full orchestra.

“It was scary and calm,” Druckman added recently from his home in Connecticut. “It was very beautiful and controlled, and yet there were these terrifying things happening. . . .

“I have no idea what prompted it. But the urgency and clarity of this vision seemed too strong to fight, so I decided to go with it.”

Even so, Druckman hasn’t completely abandoned mathematical principles. In addition to his nocturnal images of “super-angels,” Druckman said he drew upon “the ancient idea of the Golden Mean of the Greeks . . . a proportion that appears in nature again and again.”

The Golden Mean (or Section) is found by dividing a line into two parts so that the ratio of the smaller part to the larger part is the same as the ratio of the larger part to the whole.

Druckman, however, is not the first composer to make use of it in music.

“Debussy used it very consciously, as did Bartok,” Druckman said. “Normally it’s applied to durations of adjacent sections. In this piece, however, in addition to that kind of control, it’s in every section in terms of larger sections and even smaller phrases nesting within the larger phrases.”

“It’s typical for me,” he added, “to have, on the one hand, a kind of emotional or visceral feeling about a piece and, on the other, a very intellectual, structural notion of what the piece should be like.”

A Pulitzer Prize-winner (for “Windows,” in 1972), Druckman, 63, taught at the Juilliard School in New York for 15 years and now is a professor of composition at Yale.

He also served as composer-in-residence at the New York Philharmonic from 1982 to 1986, and during that time organized three Philharmonic festivals of new music. The first, in 1983, was entitled “Since 1968, a New Romanticism?”; the second, in 1984, “The New Romanticism--A Broader View,” and the third, in 1986, “Music as Theater.”

“The premise (of the festivals) was that somewhere in the late 1960s, composers and music took a huge turn,” he said. “The ‘50s and ‘60s’ hegemony of intellectual thinking started modifying in the other direction, and there was a great shift toward things romantic.

“When I say romantic , everybody imagines effete late 19th-Century, Biedermeier, sentimental music. That’s not at all what I’m talking about. It was leaning toward a trust of things intuitive, that things intuitive transcend things intellectual.

“There is no question that at least in the ‘50s and ‘60s, there was a kind of cold war between audiences and new music. It’s gone.

“Composers of new music don’t have throngs of admirers bearing them on their shoulders, but you have marvelous phenomena like John Adams, who has a huge audience. The amount of new music being done by major orchestras is incredible compared to what it was 20 years ago. No doubt, there has been a warming tendency, a nice kind of global warming.”

Although the Philharmonic Society’s commission was announced in February, 1991, Druckman expects he’ll still be working on it right up to rehearsals this week.

“The world is divided into two kinds of people, which becomes evident the minute you get into first grade,” he said. “There are the terrible kids who get their book reviews done before they’re due; the rest of us get it done the night before it’s due. I fear I am forever cast into that second group. No matter how much time I have to complete the piece, the degree of hysteria toward the end is my own manufacture.”

Jacob Druckman’s “Seraphic Games” will receive its premiere by the Los Angeles Philharmonic led by Zubin Mehta on Saturday at 7 p.m. at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. The work was commissioned by the Philharmonic Society, which sponsors the concert, and the Edward Halvajian Family Foundation. The program also will include works by Beethoven, Schubert and Mahler. Baritone Thomas Hampson will be the soloist. (714) 646-6277.