Here's how I feel about it, and why I'm doing this. I believe in new nonpop. I've done it all my adult life -- coming to it late, at age 14, as a choice, not some default of musical skill. From the beginning and now at age 57, I don't think it, I feel it as a substance of life. From the days of the abstruse avant-garde through these more 'accessible' times, I have been thrilled to hear new pieces -- even weak ones, even bad ones. There was always something enriching, personal, and powerful inside each one. I strove to achieve the same myself...

Perhaps some of this enthusiasm and dedication comes from being outside academia, always hawking my music, if you will, and personally organized concerts before groups of people who by and large were neither musicians nor classical audiences, never students or professors. No matter where, we would enthrall the audience in some way. My first such concert was in 1969. Even when we did our "Closing the Book on the Avant-Garde" concert in the mid-1980s, the audience didn't seem to want that book closed. They wanted more -- and we did that second concert, "Closing the Book, Volume II". There were converts to new sounds made those nights.

It continues. I had the privilege of hosting, with my fellow composer David Gunn, "Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar", which during 537 two-hour episodes, we were up close & personal with composers and their work -- always live or at least recorded and broadcast unedited. It was a thrill. Even the composers struggling against their own modicum of innate talent had a spark and a passion. It was a wonder to behold. And the geniuses we spoke with -- David Del Tredici, Kaija Saariaho, David Behrmann, Linda Smith, and many others -- were brilliant and humbling.

When we ended the show last September (mostly because we were flat-out exhausted preparing the show every week and handling the mass of followup email), we knew that our goal of spreading the news of this Golden Age of new music had essentially failed. Our audience remained a niche because we could never crack the mainstream media. It was nearly nine years before we even counted our millionth site visitor. Hardly an impact -- even after we won the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award in 2000, created the massive Ought-One Festival with 37 concerts in one weekend the next year, and done a two-day Komposer Kombat that resulted in the composition of 41 new works on the spot, from around the world. It was, as I've said, an absolute thrill.

After three months without K&D, though, I decided to do this 365-composition project. I'd always wanted to do it as a personal challenge, and thought, if nothing else, I could burn up in a flash that someone in the greater public realm would see, perhaps igniting that flame in more places than the tiny places I'd performed.

Unfortunately, I'm finding the same barriers of lack of interest in the media as I experienced way back in 1969 -- this time, even those who had been attentive to K&D have failed to acknowledge this project in any way. Perhaps the idea of composition-on-demand, every day, every hour, sounded cheap to them. But I believe that if it does rise over the top, and if other composers begin the same sort of challenge, there were be listeners. Maybe they'll be the "American Idol" sort to start, but any start is more than we have with our museum orchestras and backward-looking public radio.

It could be a mixed blessing. As more people listen, there will arise standards of judgment from that experience. Those of us who thought we were interesting may find our work ignored once again. Others we will be surprised to find a rise in their prominence and unexpectedly positive opinions. But overall, and here is the point of the project's name, we will begin once again to reclaim the depth and scope and relistenability that is nonpop's strength through the ages. We will all, once again, become Mozarts -- or Salieris, if you like. But again heard, criticized, waited for, booed, cheered, and remembered all the way home.

Does that make sense? Or is this just going to be a fruitless year ahead of me?

Not at all. This is about visibility and gimmicks (how I've always done it) and audiences. I would prefer that every composer compose more and be more visible. The Mozart bit is the gimmick, because it's his 250th and using his name is controversial.

Composers are by and large lazy and fearful. Not all of them, but American composers in particular are prone to false humility and a really underdeveloped sense of marketing. Many would rather write for colleagues and competitions and loft concerts than for the local school kids.

But it's at the local level that a sense of what it is developed. To test it, I taught elementary school music for six years in the late 1980s, carrying one class through. Kids do not distinguish pop from nonpop. And if it's presented in an equivalent 'platform', then they take it in and know it as unjudgmentally as anything else. My kids played and read and wrote music with whatever notation system then needed to communicate it. They recorded it in a little studio that they ran (made up of my equipment). And when they could recognize the Bartók and the Mozart and the Larry Austin together with the (in those days) Milli Vanilli and Michael Jackson and movie themes, it just made me grin. They had no sense that they [the compositions] were different. Their parents and the middle/high school music teachers were confounded. So no one bothered to follow up, but to this day, they still remember that music. The kid who today is a logger can still smile and nod to a Bartok string quartet. Imagine that.

That's part of the personality gimmick, too. Even 'classical' listeners love a personality. We [composers] just don't have any personalities, and our crazies aren't crazy enough.

That's one of the ideas of this project. If I can get traction at all (which depends on getting past the threshold with mainstream media writers and bypassing the 'classical' ghetto), and somebody to talk to, then I can get nonpop on Letterman. Maybe it'll be me and I'll have to wear a silly hat. Or maybe someone else will do it. But songs by Phil Kline & Eve Beglarian on Letterman? Damn, that would be hot! And the audience would love it!

I do. Why not? I can't get much poorer, so there's nothing to lose. And judgment only comes from experience. Your average intelligent teenager can talk with greater clarity and perception about pop than almost any adult I know can talk about nonpop. The kids know the instruments, who plays them, and can distinguish styles accurately -- styles with marginal differences (check out Ishkur's Guide for a revelation). If they don't already know the specific pieces being played, adult classical listeners can hardly tell a Mozart from a Haydn, much less a Beethoven from a Reicha, or (in real fiction-realm now) a Pärt from a Penderecki.

The more that ears are flooded with the sound, the better the judgment becomes, or at least the body of knowledge. Even if you're not interested -- as my wife isn't interested in computers -- the mere continual experience infuses abilities. Today, without ever opening a manual, she is better skilled at and has more 'intuitive' knowledge of computers than most of her quotidien contemporaries. (And new nonpop, too.)

This is not Mozart's time. It's not about that. You have been acculturated to love Brahms. His music, along with Mozart's and Beethoven's, I find excruciatingly dull. When I said at the outset that I "feel it as a substance of life", I meant new nonpop, what's being created during my life as I continue to live it. I meant Del Tredici and Didkovsky and Beglarian and Barlow and Saariaho and Pritsker and a hundred others. And I, too [like the composer correspondent], have been a jazz listener since my teens -- but to Coltrane (who was still alive) and Monk and Ayler and Earl Brown and Ornette and Braxton and Cecil Taylor back in those days, not to the 'classic' jazz artists who were, with the possible exception of Parker, just historical curiosities to me.

Why is it really that you don't want to know that piece for bass clarinet & violas better? It's an important question, but those who make a choice for Brahms over the Diddly Squat composer are not the audience for my project. The audience is those who know and care about neither because they never had enough experience. They will listen and come to know Diddly Squat and the E Minor Symphony -- and might ultimately choose the former. Who can say? Maybe Diddly Squat is a classic.

But wait! I would never, ever start such a process of discovery with Brahms. Or any other older composer. Every artform we take seriously and talk about as intelligent adults is contemporary, except for the nonpop. We did art history or film history in college, but that's not where we live. I hope to help initiate a change not by converting an audience with prejudices in place, but by inviting new ones, by bringing this project over the horizon of visibility to those for whom Brahms and Mozart and Stravinsky are all alien (three names from the Reader's Digest set that was my introduction to 'classical' music as a teenager -- and the Stravinsky was my first choice and played to scratches).

It will never be pop. But the idea is to make it visible, and thus audible.