David Felder did not envision a career in musical composition. After the premiere of his third composition, "Rondage," however, two of Felder's Miami University (Ohio) faculty mentors interrupted a celebratory gathering of fellow students in his dorm room and told Felder in no uncertain terms that he must give composition a "serious try." Heady words for the young, aspiring choral conductor and jazz-keyboard player. Felder's ensuing compositional career has brought him to the upper echelons of the American new-music scene.

Named Pitt's 2008 Franz Lehar Composer, Felder's music will be featured Sunday night at Bellefield Hall Auditorium. "Colleccion Nocturna" and "partial[dist]res[s]toration" will give the Music On the Edge audience compelling entry points into Felder's unique compositional aesthetic -- an aesthetic that approaches sound from the inside out.

Felder describes his musical voice as one that is "less focused on harmony and more concerned with the 'verticalization' of what we hear in a sound." The result is music that explores the subtle timbral variations contained within a single tone. To make audible the many timbral colors available to a single pitch, at times, Felder will repeat a note and ask the player to change performance technique with each reiteration. The constant pitch changes inflection through different timbres.

Felder began developing his ear for close listening to timbral differences in junior high school as a licensed amateur radio operator. Listening through the frequencies of radio static, he learned to distinguish the meaningful, Morse Code rhythms of other radio operators. Normally operating within a limited broadcasting range, Felder remembers the amplification that solar flares once brought to his radio signal in the seventh grade, allowing him to directly communicate with an operator in Cuba.

His compositions become a complex of associations, both external and personal. In 2001, culling material from his sketch pads, Felder wrote his six-movement "partial[dist]res[s]toration" as an extended slow movement for the New York New Music Ensemble. Partially referring to the process of distressing new furniture to resemble antiques, the title came to him while channel surfing. The title also describes the manipulations of his musical materials throughout the work. After a flashy opening, the work dissolves into "a [musical] space in which a lot of things are resonating." The final movement, "die felder sind grau," initially emerged to Felder from the Bruce Hornsby tune "Fields of Gray," a song Felder would sing to his son as a lullaby. It is composed so that the University of Buffalo's Slee Concert Hall "would sing in response to the resonances."

In addition to his teaching position at the University of Buffalo, Felder hosts the annual new music festival in June in Buffalo. In 1985, Felder resurrected the festival founded by Morton Feldman in 1975. Since then, 600 young composers have participated in the festival.

During his 23 years as the festival's artistic director, Felder has observed that the growth in student composers' "overall competency level" has come at the cost of the students' "attitude[s] toward risk taking." He attributes this inverse relationship to the general atmosphere fostered by the "academic universe" as "a place where [creative] risk is [not] rewarded."

Recognizing that excellence in the arts cannot be predicted, his advice to young composers is to "work really hard to find out what you want to do and work to do it." It's advice that parallels the encouragement Felder received during his own undergraduate career.

First Published: January 17, 2008, 10:00 a.m.