Joel Sachs, with soprano Martha Elliott (a Juilliard alumna), in the museum of the Palace of the Emirs in Bukhara on his first trip to Uzbekistan, in 1999.

The New Juilliard Ensemble's concert on December 10 will provide a robust reminder that a spherical planet can produce some very interesting cross-relationships. The works to be heard (all New York premieres) come from five countries on three continents: Japan, Mongolia, the Netherlands, Tajikistan, and the United States.

Festivals are excellent places to meet performers and composers from around the world, and the Ilkhom Festival of Contemporary Music, a small, dynamic festival in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, is no exception. Among the local residents I met in 1999 was Alisher Latif-Zadeh, a friendly 37-year-old man. He was experiencing serious difficulties, having fled his homeland in neighboring Tajikistan, during the vicious civil war there a few years earlier. Settling in Tashkent, a city of great culture, ought to have been a pleasure, but the economic situation there, as in all of Central Asia, is precarious. There also are ethnic frictions: the Uzbeks are Turkic, while the Tajiks are cousins of the Persians. To his credit, Latif-Zadeh said very little about his political status or the problems of making a new life; he was focused on making his way professionally and hoped to interest me in his music. The sheer quantity of scores that arrive on my desk (coupled with the chaos created by moving to a new apartment) meant that it wasn't until April 2002—as I was contemplating my third trip to Tashkent—that I finally got around to considering his music.

To my delight, I thoroughly enjoyed what I heard. One piece was a marvelous fusion of Central Asian music and jazz—completely convincing, and witty to a surprising degree, since Latif-Zadeh had struck me as intensely serious. I e-mailed him to ask if he might be interested in writing something for the New Juilliard Ensemble, and he readily agreed. I did not have anything financial to offer, other than a fee for the use of the materials, but in Uzbekistan even a small number of U.S. dollars can be a big help—and getting international exposure while living in a country without great resources for cultural promotion is extremely difficult.

He completed the piece on schedule, and e-mailed it to me using the music notation software Sibelius (postage can make a big dent in the small incomes there). His e-mail was a real surprise: his earlier pieces had been handwritten. But it opened perfectly, printed out elegantly, and revealed a striking new work for chamber orchestra and tape. Sending the CD with the electronic sounds was a matter of extreme concern for Latif-Zadeh, since a courier shipment can cost a month's salary. Before I had the chance to tell him how to send it pre-paid, however, he had risked sending it by ordinary mail, for only $1.70—and, to our mutual astonishment, it arrived in perfect condition after only a week.

As to the Mongolian presence: Sansargereltech Sangidorj (whom I shall refer to as Sansar, as he is usually known) had come to New York in conjunction with an invitation to the Tanglewood workshop of Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road project. He was given my name as a possible contact, telephoned, and we met for a coffee in the Juilliard cafeteria. It was a challenging encounter, because at that time his English was underdeveloped.

New Juilliard Ensemble Alice Tully Hall, Tuesday, Dec. 10, 8 p.m. Free tickets are required; for details, see the Calendar.

I had already enjoyed my first trip to Mongolia, and was very much in the mood to meet a Mongolian composer. Sansar—a virtuoso pianist and composer trained in Mongolia, the Moscow Conservatory, and Madrid—gave me a package of his music, which also languished for a while. (I feel obliged to examine materials in the order in which they arrive, to paraphrase the familiar recorded telephone message.) But before my second trip to Mongolia last June, I gave the matter priority. Once again, I was delighted by what I heard, and even began learning one of his solo piano pieces, hoping to perform it in Mongolia. (I did not see him there, however: Sansar was in Virginia, where his wife is a sushi chef's assistant.) Among his pieces was a beautiful work for large ensemble with Mongolian instruments—a kind of concerto for morin khuur, the gorgeous Mongolian "horse fiddle." I immediately wanted to perform it, but proposed that he re-write it as a concerto for viola and ensemble. (The viola's sound would approximate that of the morin khuur.) I announced the piece, immediately setting in motion the mouth-watering apparatus of the ensemble's violists. But the "concerto" was not to be—simply because the morin khuur is tuned in fourths and the viola in fifths. Some virtuosic passages that, on morin khuur, combine high-register melodies over a drone on the lowest open string, necessitate impossible double-stop stretches on the viola. In the end, the original solo part became the property of the entire string group. One more potential viola concerto was lost! But one more work for Western instruments was gained.

The remainder of the program is no less interesting, even if its origins are less exotic. The Japanese piece also has a little background tale. Several years ago, Akiko Suwanai, the young Japanese violin virtuoso, was a student in my seminar on music since 1945. The combination of a rehearsal for a concerto appearance with the Boston Symphony, and a command from the Ministry of the Interior that she extend a forthcoming stay in Japan so that she could perform for President Clinton, had put her status in the course at risk. Dean Clapp and I agreed, however, that she was a serious student and an excellent citizen of Juilliard, and I proposed that she write an extra project about Japanese new music in order not to lose credit for the semester. I thought the project would push her into finding out what was available, and maybe add her to the list of virtuosi who play the music of their time—but she was well ahead of me, and already knew a lot of new music. Her interesting paper on younger Japanese composers included a tape of music by Akio Yasuraoka (whose name I had never heard). When I listened, I knew that his music would be worth performing—and as it happened, the tape included a work perfectly suited to the New Juilliard Ensemble. It should give the audience great pleasure on our December 10 concert (along with works by the Netherlands' Robin de Raaff and New Yorker Derek Bermel).

Joel Sachs, director of the New Juilliard Ensemble and the annual Focus! Festival, has been on the faculty since 1970.