The composer gathers them individually from the case, which is one of the drawers of a desk, and arranges them side by side in a special composing stick.
And that is surely why Ives's special favorite composer was Franck, whose Symphony in D minor was as haunted by Beethoven's Ninth (and his late quartets) as Ives's "Concord" Sonata was by Beethoven's Fifth.
Another, "Spano's Specials," lists composers whose music Mr. Spano is eager to conduct: Mendelssohn, Bernstein, Barber, Tchaikovsky.
"He had that crazy jazz going," Johnny Mercer, one of Arlen's collaborators, told Walter Cronkite in a nineteen-sixties TV special on the composer.
For an entire week, the music of more than two hundred international composers played by an equally international cast of performers will be heard, with special emphasis on composers utilizing not just digital sound but also visual media.
It is no surprise that his poetry has exerted a special appeal to composers.
Tucked in the year-end tax bill was a special gift for composers, courtesy of retiring Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn): Beginning Jan . 1 the profits they reap from selling their song catalogues will be taxed as long-term capital gains, at a top rate of 15%.
Despite all those accolades, however, it does not take much to make the 66-year-old composer feel special, he said in a recent phone interview.
He seemed to have a special bond with this composer, particularly with Wagner's central Romantic ideal of the redemption of a hero by the sacrificial love of a woman.
And a special guest, the French composer Tristan Murail, a founder of spectral music that emerged in France during the 70's, will be present for New Music New Haven's presentation of his major work "Désintégrations," Thursday at 8 p.m. in Sprague Hall, along with works by Yale composers.
