For Him, Composing Is a Search, Not a Conquest : Music: ‘I <i> discover </i> a piece, I don’t impose on it. The piece takes on its own life,’ Hale Smith tells his audience during an appearance at UC Irvine.

Long before the word crossover became popular, Hale Smith wasmoving easily between and within the jazz and classical music worlds, as he showed in a composers’ forum Wednesday at UC Irvine.

One of his classical pieces, “Innerflexions,” written in 1977, was heard on CD, after which Smith, as part of a weeklong appointment as Chancellor’s Distinguished Lecturer in music, answered questions from faculty members James Newton and Bernard Gilmore. Alfred Lang, chairman of the department, introduced the three speakers before a small audience in the Fine Arts Concert Hall.

Smith, who was born in 1925 in Cleveland, studied piano and composition at the Cleveland Institute of Music, where he earned undergraduate and graduate degrees.

He moved to New York in 1958 and worked as a music editor for various publishers, arranged and wrote for jazz groups and artists such as Dizzy Gillespie, Quincy Jones and Ahmad Jamal, among others, and, of course, composed concert, chamber and choral music.

Newton wondered about Hale’s compositional style.

“I like to think of myself as a motivic composer, an organic composer,” Smith answered. “In a truly integral piece, an organic concept is so impregnated (that) wherever you cut, you will cut into flesh and bone. . . . In this piece, there was no padding (or) stretching devices. It was all skeleton, muscle fiber. No fat.”

The absorbing, moody work, he said, was written for a “celebration” of black composers by the New York Philharmonic.

“I was told to climax an entire week! So I couldn’t write a pastorale type of piece.”

The large-scale, 15-minute work “was strictly composed according to serial principals, which has nothing to do with academic post-Webern serialism. That’s child’s play.”

His only tools were a metronome, a stopwatch and a pocket calculator--arranging time “as a structural principle” by using graph paper to plot “points of climax and resolution of tensions.”

“The number of measures--that comes later. It’s like a gardener preparing the soil before a garden is planted,” he explained. “I tend to think in sculptural terms. I control time in those terms. (In this work), the moments of relative quiet are very proportional (conforming) to a human capacity for comprehension.”

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But the basic process remains organic.

“When I have an idea, I let that idea start germinating,” he said. “For me, composition is an act of discovery. I discover a piece, I don’t impose on it. The piece takes on its own life, and I listen to the piece. It has to talk to me, telling me what the piece is supposed to be.”

When Newton asked how Smith had learned his masterful orchestration, Smith said, “Mozart, Mahler and Duke is my stock answer. And when I say Duke, I don’t mean The Duke (John Wayne).”

That quip, however, doesn’t quite cover everything.

“I have learned from the entire world of music expression, but even more profound influences came from non-musicians,” he said.

He used a metaphor of having a “personal and private bucket” with which to “dip” into all these possible influences “whenever and wherever I please.” His work in jazz, for instance, gave him a “sense of pulse and security of pulse.” But even when he was writing for Gillespie, it was his music he was writing, not imitation-Gillespie.

So where does his inspiration come from? He doesn’t know.

“But I do know I did not give it to myself,” he said. “I hold it in trust.”