PERFORMING ARTS : They Wrote the Book on Bookings : Meet the men who schedule the music, dance and opera events that fill up those glossy subscription brochures every fall.

So, you want to get some culture. Well, you can buy a ticket to “Stomp” any time over the next five weeks. And there’s plenty of serious music around--often the same chamber group, for instance, will play two or three venues, separated by a few days and a few miles.

For weeks on end, there will be “Nutcrackers” everywhere. But you’ll have to wait for just three nights in November to see the Dance Theatre of Harlem--and you’ll have to drive to Orange County. And you can scratch the Martha Graham company off your list. It may be touring, but not to the Southland.

What’s that? You want to know why ? It’s in the hands of arts administrators, the people who choose the mix and book the talent, hoping to please their own institutions, the fans and, as we discovered when we talked to those in charge at a few local venues, themselves.

UCLA has been in the impresario business for about 60 years. It all began, said Michael Blachly, since 1992 director of the university’s Center for the Performing Arts, with “a Great Performers series, presenting Western art forms. That foundation still exists as part of the center’s mission, but we’ve expanded in many directions as we’ve become much more aware of the many communities that comprise Los Angeles.”

Diversity, in fact, is what seems to characterize state-run, state-funded UCLA’s choices these days. “Our mission now,” Blachly said, “is to really let the university speak to the many populations that are part of our contemporary community.”

Blachly, 48, has a doctorate in educational psychology and in administration, but in 1985 he came to UCLA, as associate director of the performing arts center, after two years with Columbia Artists Management Inc.

The new UCLA season, now underway, presents about 65 different artists in 16 series. “They will do multiple performances,” Blachly said, “plus we have a lot of the artists-in-residence activities, master classes, outreach. The total number of activities ends up being 250 a year.”

To make his choices, Blachly seeks input from his staff, faculty, students, and support and community groups. But “ultimately, I am responsible and accountable.”

Programming begins about two years in advance. “The season for the most part is completed between September and October of the prior year, although there might be some slight changes,” Blachly said. “Right now, we’re fairly well in place for the 1996-97 season.” According to Blachly, his logical constituency--UCLA students--tends to like contemporary events. “Ten years ago, we felt the program should consist of about 25% contemporary works,” he said. “Actually we’ve done better than that. About a third of what we present is contemporary, which could be newly commissioned works or could be emerging performers.”

But the programmer is just as mindful of the off-campus crowd. Students and faculty, it turns out, are not the majority of his ticket buyers. “Sixty-five percent of our audience,” Blachly said, “comes from the community at large.”

U nlike UCLA’s slow-growth process, the Orange County Performing Arts Center blossomed in one fell swoop when it opened in 1986. “The center arrived on the scene mature,” said executive director Tom Tomlinson, 45. “It went from nothing to 260 performances a year.”

Tomlinson is the second director of the facility. He arrived in 1993 from the Alaska Center for the Performing Arts in Anchorage, and he inherited a situation more complex than Blachly’s. OCPAC serves as a presenter and a rental hall. Regional groups such as the Philharmonic Society of Orange County, Pacific Symphony and Opera Pacific hire and independently book the center.

In the choice of renters and performers, OCPAC, which prides itself on spending not a penny of public money, is less obligated to diversity issues than to fulfilling its mission of providing Orange County with access to “classical music, opera, dance and Broadway,” Tomlinson said.

In fact, the center has become the premiere Southland presenter of national and international ballet almost by default, as most other venues have cut back or pulled out of the pricey field. It also presents a Broadway series, a modest chamber music and jazz series, and a few individual events.

“We do a little over 60% of the available dates, the regionals around 40%,” Tomlinson said. Programming is a nightmare.

“The regionals make requests for dates,” Tomlinson said. “Obviously, they would like to have everything on Friday and Saturday. But there are only so many Fridays and Saturdays. “Since we book four weeks of Broadway shows and four weeks of dance, we have to hold a good group of weeks empty. Broadway presenters are the slowest to confirm, so it doesn’t come together until it all comes together. I like to say that the whole process is like setting up a row of dominoes. They’re all up until the moment they fall down.”

U nlike Blachly or Tomlinson, Dorrance Stalvey, director of music programs at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, didn’t aim to be an administrator. Stalvey, 65, became associated with the museum’s Monday Evening Concerts in the ‘60s, both as a composer and a board member.

When the then-director of the Monday series, Lawrence Morton, decided to leave the post in 1970, Stalvey was on the search committee to find a successor. “We were getting toward the end of that season and hadn’t been successful in finding anyone,” Stalvey said. “I volunteered to do the job, until we found someone else. That was 25 years ago.”

He now oversees six series devoted to classical music: the Monday concerts; the Bing series; programs by the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra and the California EAR Unit; the Pro Musicis recital series, and a collaboration with the Southwest Chamber Music Society.

“There are about 28 concerts altogether,” Stalvey said. “The California EAR Unit plays what you could call the ‘avant-garde,’ even though that’s hard to define.

“The Bing series is generally 19th-Century repertoire. The Southwest group is doing a complete Beethoven string quartet cycle. The Pro Musicis are artists who have won the Pro Musicis International Awards. The Baroque Orchestra--they don’t do just Baroque repertory--this year will be playing a Bach family concert and also works by Mendelssohn, Rossini, Schubert and Berlioz.”

The Monday Evening Concerts continue much as Stalvey inherited them--early 20th-Century repertory and contemporary classics.

“In a sense, I do enjoy a kind of carte blanche in programming, though I shouldn’t say that. No one tries to push anything on me or influence me. But we are part of the museum; the concerts are the musical counterpart of what’s in the galleries. So I concentrate on the fine arts repertoire rather than repertoire that is ‘popular,’ or a vehicle for the performer.”

His own programming baby is the free, year-round Friday evening open-air jazz series.

“I was a jazz musician originally,” Stalvey said. “I got my master’s degree in clarinet. I played classical on clarinet, and jazz on saxophone. But I stopped listening to any jazz for many years, until I established for myself what I really wanted to do, which was compose. Now I only want to listen to the best music, whatever it is.”

Apparently, lots of people agree. “We have hundreds of people falling off the plaza Friday nights.”