A Lucky Man

Any list of prominent new music guardians in Los Angeles would have to include the man called Lucky. In 1970, Stephen “Lucky” Mosko arrived at the then-new California Institute of the Arts as a graduate student and teaching assistant, and gradually proceeded to get a grip on the reins of the contemporary music scene. He never really let go. From Ojai to San Diego, from the California EAR Unit to the Los Angeles Philharmonic, his influence has been felt.

Mosko recently turned 50, and starting today, the Southwest Chamber Music Society unveils a series of events celebrating his birthday and his quarter century of teaching, composing and conducting. “It’s odd being 50,” Mosko concedes. “I realize that I’m between generations now--between the composers I knew and was inspired by--Cage and Feldman and the like--and the younger composers, some of whom are my students.”

Listening to him, it’s obvious that Mosko’s married to the cause, and he’s literally married to another of its activists, flutist Dorothy Stone, an EAR Unit founder. Their collaborations are legion, and not the least of them is the life they’ve made in the extra-urban splendor of Green Valley, a tiny township close to Saugus and his work headquarters at CalArts in Valencia.

The birthday events focus on Mosko the composer, though he will also conduct for some of the performances. The variety in his professional life, he says, is mostly a benefit: “I think I’m healthier as a composer because I do these other things. Composition is a wonderful thing. I really wouldn’t mind at all if I could just write full time. But that never seemed to me a possibility, and I’ve never resented not having it.

“It’s the Charles Ives syndrome,” he said, referring to a Great American Composer, who was an insurance magnate by day and a creator of iconoclastic music in his off hours. “If you want to make a living as a composer, you probably have to compromise yourself. I’d rather work as a teacher and conductor, which I still think are very morally correct ways of making a living--not working in a weapons factory or being a lawyer,” he said with a laugh.

As a composer, Mosko is also known for his divergent interests. His curiosity has been piqued by jazz and rock drumming, Anton Webern, Icelandic folk music, Sufi music and even Mahler. His music reflects it all, without ever landing squarely in a fixed style or school. Reviewers write about his “constantly shifting sonic colors,” “an intricate array of small patterns,” the exploitation “of both traditional and unusual sounds.”

Not surprisingly, Mosko’s office at CalArts betrays his eclectic turn of mind. There is the cloth pennant reading “Rotary Club Darmstadt,” a kitschy artifact that he dug up on a visit to the annual new music festival there, a famed mecca for experimentalists of all stripes--including Stockhausen, whose work Mosko has conducted and championed. There is a vividly colored print of an acupuncture operation he picked up in Chinatown in San Francisco, a city where he spent a fair amount of time in the past decade, as music director of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, a post he recently left.

More puzzling: a Barbie doll in an autographed box topped by a Hot Wheels toy car. It turns out that his aunt, Ruth Handler, invented Barbie in the 1950s (it’s her autograph) and started Mattel toys with her toy designer husband Elliott, creator of Hot Wheels and other staples of kid culture.

Mosko’s own sense of fun is mostly revealed in the breadth of his work. Today’s program includes a piano solo piece from 1996, a bit of 1984’s “Indigenous Music II,” which will show off his folk music interests and features playing by Stone, and “Rapuze,” a piece that, like many of his works, oscillates between dissonance and sweetness. “For Morton Feldman,” from 1987, reflects the impact that that composer (and CalArts teacher) had on Mosko. “I wanted to write a piece for him the way he wrote for Samuel Beckett, Philip Guston and others,” Mosko explained, “a piece that was like a conversation.”

Later in the week, Southwest Chamber Music will feature Mosko’s “Psychotropics” on a varied program in its regular series and will make it the focus of a lecture/discussion/performance. Commissioned by Southwest in 1994, it’s particularly apt as summary birthday fare.

“ ‘Psycho’ means mind, spirit or soul, and ‘trope’ means ‘to turn,’ ” explained Mosko at the time of the premiere, “so the title means ‘to change your mind, spirit or soul,’ which I think music always does.”

Born and raised in Denver, Mosko got his nickname, “Lucky,” from his parents. “My family was always into nicknames and gambling. They figured that if they gave me this name, it might bring luck to everyone.”

Young Lucky was a precocious percussionist who, in the eighth grade, was playing jazz drums while studying with emigre conductor Antonia Brico. Her love of late 19th century Romanticism led him, happily, into the realm of Wagner and Mahler. But once in Yale, he was tugged toward modernism: “When I heard Webern, I fell in love with that music.”

Mosko was called out West by one of his teachers at Yale, Mel Powell, then head of CalArts’ music department. Mosko, who earned his B.A. at Yale and later got his M.F.A. at CalArts, was ready. “After five years at Yale, I was really feeling that the East Coast was getting very stale. There was Babbitt and Cage, the Uptown school and the Downtown school. You had to write like this, and you had to know these people to get ahead. Coming to CalArts was like coming to the wilderness.”

Things took shape in this wilderness. Mosko teamed with CalArts colleague Morton Subotnick to stage a series of influential contemporary music festivals in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, culminating in 1983. “That year,” he recalled, “we had Steve Reich, Milton Babbit, Morton Feldman, John Adams, Xenakis, a premiere by Mel Powell, Lutoslawski--all [here], schmoozing with students. At the same time, critics were coming from Europe to cover it.

“Morton said from the beginning, ‘You know, this will become such a good festival, we’ll have to quit in 10 years because everyone will want a part of it. Then it will just become dissipated and a mishmash of things.’ And that’s exactly what happened. People wanted to interfere a lot with programming.”

The following year, Mosko got involved in the Olympic Arts Festival, staging an epic, logistically thorny Stockhausen piece. And in 1990, as music director of the Ojai Music Festival, his as usual wildly variable new music agenda won comments like “forbidding,” “provocative” and “glorious.”

Along the way, Mosko has won an NEA composer’s fellowship, two BMI awards and a Fromm Foundation award, among others. These days, his music is being played with increasing frequency: Southwest Chamber Music is putting out a CD of his music, as is the EAR Unit.

But for Mosko, quantity has never been the point.

“In a certain way,” he said, “I feel that there’s a lot of music in the world, and there doesn’t have to be a whole lot more. I’d rather think about the quality of what I’m doing and do it well, and not just try to turn it out.

“Don’t forget, my first big influence in 20th century music was Webern. Those 31 pieces of his are something. I’ve probably written about that many now. I’d rather have those 31 pieces than a hundred other pieces that aren’t like that.”

* All-Mosko concert, today, 5 p.m., Armory Center for the Arts, 145 N. Raymond St., Pasadena. $10-$20. Check Thursday and Friday listings for other Southwest Chamber Music Mosko events, or call (800) 726-7147.