High Life : A WEEKLY FORUM FOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS : Classical Gas : Sunny Hills Senior Enjoys Composing Untraditional Music in the Key of Modern

Andrew Lu is not your typical classical music composer.

For one thing, he’s not dead.

“I’ve always liked to create music,” said Lu, a senior at Sunny Hills High School in Fullerton.

Although most musicians are satisfied to play music written by others, Lu writes his own, inspired by pieces he hears and by his experiences.

His compositions include classical and jazz for both solo and groups of instruments, although his favorite instrument to write for is piano.

One of his pieces has been played by the Sunny Hills orchestra, and he has written a gospel piece to be sung a capella.

His current project is a piano concerto, which is actually more like a duet between a piano solo and the orchestra. Lu hopes to debut the piece, titled “Concerto No. 1,” at this year’s Disneyland Creativity Contest.

Lu started composing in the fifth grade, when he entered a competition and took first place. Since then, he has been honored many times, including winning the Disneyland contest two years ago.

He is also an accomplished pianist and was honored last year by the Music Teachers’ Assn. of California.

Creating music comes naturally to Lu, whose mother and sister both play piano. “My parents forced me to (take piano lessons) at first,” he said, “but now I’m pretty glad I took them.”

His composition writing begins with improvisation, then he revises for harmony.

It usually takes Lu about two weeks to improvise a four- to five-minute piece. Transcribing the piece into the computer takes “a very long time,” he said.

Ten years of private piano lessons--as well as classes in chorus, band, orchestra and jazz ensemble--have exposed Lu to many hours of musical ideas.

Sometimes, he says, it is hard to be totally creative and not steal ideas.

“It’s easy to get stuck on musical ideas,” Lu said. “I’ve tried--or heard--them all before.”

Although his music is classical in nature, it makes use of different chords and rhythms than does traditional classical music--usually a “driving” syncopation. Lu said people tend to think of his pieces as jazz because “it’s all dissonant.”

“People don’t understand my music; they’re not used to it.”

Lu draws some of his inspiration from Romantic and Impressionistic composers such as Rachmaninoff and Debussy. His music, like theirs, is inspired by images and emotions.

But Lu is closer to modern contemporary composers such as Milhaud and Unger, who compose very dissonant pieces and are considered as revolutionary to classical music as Metallica is to the Beach Boys. He says the typical reaction to this type of modern music is “that stuff makes no sense.”

But Lu enjoys listening to the music and says he plays it much better than something like a Mozart composition. “I consider it very creative and evocative,” he said.

Lu hopes to follow in the footsteps of John Williams, conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra and composer of many famous movie scores, among them “Jaws,” “Star Wars and “E.T.--The Extra-Terrestrial.”

The late Leonard Bernstein is another conductor and composer that Lu looks to for inspiration. Bernstein wrote the score for “Candide” and “West Side Story.” He began as an accompanist, which Lu does too.

Lu played piano in his high school’s musicals--”Funny Girl” and “Little Shop of Horrors”--his freshman and sophomore years, but he missed last year’s musical because he was on a tour of Singapore, the result of an essay contest victory. Lu sees his career path as similar to those of Williams and Bernstein. He wants to compose music in Williams’ style--a combination of classical and popular music, which, he says, captures “the excitement” of life.

“I want to create something more than just performance, something that will last a lot longer than I will--something significant,” he said.

Lu had wanted to pursue his studies in New York at Juilliard, the country’s most prestigious school of music, but his parents have forbidden it unless he can prove his music alone can provide a sufficient source of income.

So he applied to Yale and is planning a double major in composition and science.

The one thing Lu hopes to achieve through his work is to “change everyone’s perception about classical music.”