MUSIC : ‘Overnight Pieces’ to See the Light of Day

Envious of artist friends who could paint a picture in a day or two, “and it would be an honest-to-goodness work,” Mel Powell decided to start writing what he calls “overnight pieces.”

“That would mean I would write them quite quickly,” says the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, now 69. “And there would be one other advantage: They would embrace what Johana Harris (widow of composer Roy Harris) calls ‘the purity of the single line.’ Everything else for me becomes dense and terribly complex. This would be at the other extreme.”

Two of Powell’s “overnights” are on the Southwest Chamber Music Society program Thursday at Chapman University in Orange. Violinist Peter Marsh will play “Nocturne” and flutist Dorothy Stone will play “Three Madrigals.” Neither takes longer than about six minutes, the composer says.

“Nocturne,” Powell recalls, began as a piece for violin, voice and electronics, and “it was not bad that way, but I wanted to have the fiddle alone--no electronics, no human voice, just the fiddle alone. So I rewrote it into the “Nocturne,” which fitted perfectly into the ‘overnight’ piece category.”

“Three Madrigals” began as a single piece for flute, a filler for a recording that Powell was making. But the player, Rachel Rudich, asked for more. Powell remembers her telling him that she wanted to play the piece in public but couldn’t unless it had some “companions” she could play along with it. “She sounded so good, I went ahead and wrote two more,” he says.

Powell is a native of New York and a pillar of the music department at California Institute of the Arts in Valencia since its founding in 1969. Powell won the Pulitzer in 1990 for “Duplicates,” a concerto for two pianos and orchestra. It took him three years to write that large-scale and difficult work, which had been commissioned for the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

“I usually have to work down from a certain complexity. When writing for large ensembles, I really have to make it something manageable, negotiable by the players,” Powell says. “I know, being an old fellow, how much rehearsal time they don’t have, and how expensive rehearsals are.

“But they don’t have to worry about that with the ‘overnight’ pieces . . . . They do go on in a wonderfully free kind of way.”

What: Mel Powell’s “Nocturne” and “Three Madrigals,” to be played by the Southwest Chamber Music Society.

When: Thursday, Sept. 17, at 8 p.m.

Where: Bertea Hall, Chapman University, 333 N. Glassell St., Orange.

Whereabouts: Take the Garden Grove (22) Freeway to the Glassell Street exit, head north and go three blocks past Chapman Avenue to the university. Or take the Chapman Ave. exit off either the Santa Ana (5) Freeway (and head east) or the Costa Mesa (55) Freeway (and head west) to Glassell Street, then head north for three blocks.

Wherewithal: $7 to $14.

Where to Call: (800) 726-7147.