Mr. Gligoric learned to play chess when he was 11 and made his first set of pieces by carving the caps of wine corks.
An exception is a set of pieces by the Italian avant-garde composer Salvatore Sciarrino, who transcribed works from Gesualdo to Gershwin for saxophone quartet.
But if another set of pieces is to be recorded, Mr. Didkovsky and company will probably have to find another guitar.
Once a student had read the complete set of pieces, she was given a surprise six-question quiz, with questions concerning both recollection and inference.
In 1994 she was approached by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, which was commissioning a set of pieces on which composers would work with other artists from other disciplines.
The album is a set of pieces for drum set, gongs, electric guitar and electric bass, violin and viola, and in one case the single note of a piano.
They briefly showed him a diagram of a chess position from an "obscure master game," gave him a set of pieces and asked him to re-create the position on an empty board from memory.
He will run through several études and jump from "Metamorphoses," the set of pieces inspired by Errol Morris's film "The Thin Blue Line," and a staging of Franz Kafka's "Metamorphosis," to "Wichita Vortex Sutra," a collaboration with Allen Ginsberg on his antiwar poem.
Salome Dances for Peace is a sensuous but epic 100-minute cycle for string quartet; Sun Rings is an even bigger set of pieces for quartet, choir, visuals and the sounds of space.
Both have appeared often in his programs (both were among the Chicago 20 this year), and he is studying a new set of pieces Mr. Benjamin is writing for him.
