By PETER GOODMAN

Einojuhani Rautavaara discovered that he was a European when he came to The Juilliard School in the fall of 1955. Already a promising young composer—his suite for brass, A Requiem in Our Time, had won the Thor Johnson Prize in Cincinnati the year before—Rautavaara had been chosen for a year's study in the United States by Jean Sibelius. The elder composer had received a 90th-birthday grant from the Koussevitzky Music Foundation, and awarded it, on the basis of the Requiem, to his young compatriot.

Einojuhani Rautavaara's Manhattan Trilogy will be premiered by the Juilliard Orchestra on October 11 at Carnegie Hall. (Photo courtesy of Ondine Records)

New York was a revelation to the 27-year-old Finn, who bore in his soul the scars of two wars, the death of both his parents, and the ruination of his continent. "I came straight from Vienna where the four occupation zones, French, English, American, and Russian, still separated city areas," Rautavaara said recently by e-mail from his home in Finland.

"There were ruins around—ruins of buildings and of people. In the U.S. the atmosphere was truly optimistic and bright—at least in Manhattan."

Juilliard was in its uptown building on 122nd Street then, and the young man first rented a room on West 110th Street, where, he once told an interviewer, he met a Puerto Rican woman who taught him how to stomp on bugs. Later he moved to 23rd Street. ("There were not so many cockroaches," he remarked.)

Living conditions aside, he found things in New York that both pleased and daunted him. "In Manhattan there were often extremes side by side: [the] worst banalities next to something most refined and special. Superlatives everywhere. Europe was more selective, but seemed to speak in [the] past tense," he said, pointing out that for new European music, that tendency would soon be reversed. "My two terms in Juilliard [were] an important time for me. What made the strongest imprint on me was Manhattan: its beauty, its cruelty, its changing moods."

Rautavaara has used his New York experiences as the inspiration for Manhattan Trilogy, the orchestral work he was commissioned by Juilliard to write, to help mark the School's 100th anniversary. Its three movements—"Daydreams," "Nightmares," and "Dawn"—are reflections of that time, he said: "Hopeful daydreams, sudden nightmares of doubt, and the slowly breaking dawn of a personality—those were the three central atmospheres of my youth—possibly, probably of any composer's or artist's youth."

The Juilliard Orchestra under James DePreist gave the world premiere of "Dawn" in August at the Temppeliaukio Church in Helsinki as part of the orchestra's centennial European tour. After that performance, a critic in the Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat wrote: "'Dawn' is vintage Rautavaara: warm sound progressing with thick melody lines, which grow from the silence of the beginning to a strong climax. Hopefully we soon get to hear the whole piece."

The premiere of the complete Manhattan Trilogy, with the Juilliard Orchestra, this time conducted by Dennis Russell Davies, is scheduled for a special Centennial Day concert to take place at Carnegie Hall on October 11, just two days after the composer's 77th birthday.

Bruce Brubaker, a former Juilliard faculty member who was on the centennial commissioning committee, said he had not known that Rautavaara was an alumnus when he first considered the composer for this commission. "He is a very important symphonic composer of the last 30 or 40 years," Brubaker, currently chair of piano at the New England Conservatory of Music, said. "When it turned out that he was a Juilliard alumnus—he said to me that he treasured his recollections—it seemed almost too good to be true."

Initially, Rautavaara was asked to write a piece for string orchestra. But the work grew as it progressed. "He said to me, 'What I am coming up with is not really a string symphony, but I'd like to write a full orchestral work,'" Brubaker recalled. "We were delighted."

What had happened for Rautavaara in New York—what called for a full orchestra—was crucial to the composer's development. Looking back on those days in a piece he wrote for Contemporary Music Review in 1995, Rautavaara said, "Six months in Manhattan was enough to arouse homesickness. But not so much homesickness for Helsinki or for Finland itself, as for Europe—where I had already managed to visit and live in a number of places. True, America was enticing and hospitable; but for the first time I understood that Europe was my proper milieu and my native place, another kind of atmosphere, for which I longed."

Rautavaara was presented with a bouquet when the Juilliard Orchestra under James DePreist gave the premiere of "Dawn," a movement of the Manhattan Trilogy, in August at the Temppeliaukio Church in Helsinki. (Photo by Heikki Tuuli)

At Juilliard, Rautavaara studied with Vincent Persichetti. (He spent summer breaks at Tanglewood, working first with Roger Sessions and then with Aaron Copland.) The composition he produced, the 1955 piano cycle Icons, was a direct result of his awakened European identity, as well as a harbinger of the mystical, religious element that is so prominent in his music.

Homesick, he had wandered into the New York Public Library and happened upon a German art book about religious icons. He immediately recalled the intense memory of a visit to a mist-beclouded monastery in the middle of Lake Ladoga just before the Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939: "The whole world was all at once full of sound and color, so that one's breath caught in the throat and one no longer understood where one was and what could happen."

The memory and the pictures inspired him to write Icons, which was first performed in 1956 at Juilliard by Arlene Zallman, a classmate of the composer. Rautavaara said he now intends to orchestrate it. "I remember how Persichetti made me rewrite the end bars in the second Icon to make the ending less obvious," he said.

He was struck by the prevalence of French music at the School and beyond, particularly vocal music. "At home everybody sang German Lieder, [but] in Juilliard it was Saint-Saëns, Fauré, Gounod, Poulenc, etc. This I found refreshing," he said.

The tonal, Americanist current was still running strongly then. Rautavaara said he recalled Copland at Tanglewood reproving a student for using the 12-tone method saying, "We should not use the techniques of the enemy." But on returning to Europe, Rautavaara himself plunged into dodecaphony and serialism. "In the '50s it seemed to be my duty to know all new methods and techniques," he said. "The only way to learn was to compose with those methods. Consequently my works were performed also at I.S.C.M. [International Society for Contemporary Music] festivals."

Eventually, the rules of serialism proved too restrictive for his own work, which now uses virtually every tool available to the contemporary composer, from taped sounds to aleatoric scoring (which leaves some elements of the music to chance). It is a situation that he finds an improvement over the years of his youth.

"The pluralism of today is a gain," he said, "and makes new music much more interesting than the rigorism of the 1950s. The music life now has a tendency to differentiate more and more. T. S. Eliot says: 'Individual talents reorder tradition.' My belief is that we should build on the Western tradition, but reorder it in a personal way."

Juilliard 100th-Anniversary Concert Juilliard Orchestra Dennis Russell Davies, Conductor Carnegie Hall Tuesday, Oct. 11, 8:00 p.m. For ticket information, please see the calendar.

The personal direction his music has taken is spiritual, though in a manner that is neither glib nor fashionable. It is true that several of his best known compositions refer to angels: the 1978 tone poem Angels and Visitations, the double bass concerto Angel of Dusk, and the Symphony No. 7 (Angel of Light). But these are neither rosy cherubim nor what Rautavaara once described as "swan-winged blondes in nightshirts presented by classical kitsch." Instead, he refers the listener to Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies, where "Jeder Engel ist schrecklich" ("Every angel is terrifying").

As for the exact extent of Rautavaara's musical spirituality, he sent an inquirer to Music and the Soul, by Kurt Leland (Hampton Roads, 2005), an analysis of the relationship between music and transcendent experiences. Leland places Rautavaara near the pinnacle of his exploration, on the plane of the "evolving mystics," composers who express mystical or religious ideas through their music, who "can access the seventh and eighth centers freely, receive inspiration from the soul or supermind, and have progressed to or beyond the level of the inner mind."

Leland writes that there are only two living, evolving mystical composers: Einojuhani Rautavaara and—a name one might not expect—Karlheinz Stockhausen. To Leland, Rautavaara is "a fully realized human being, for whom the process of musical composition has provided a means of self-actualization, and whose succession of works records the journey on that most spiritual of paths."

That may not be entirely the way Rautavaara sees himself. The "Angel" series (titles, he said in Contemporary Music Review, that he finds "just a little embarrassing") has "no programmes, no stories, no fixed imagery. They are absolute music."

For himself, he wrote, "I am not left with much that is concrete in the way of religious concepts and imagery to help build my world view. Perhaps only the definition of the German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher: 'True religion is sense and taste for the infinite.' I am helplessly attracted to the infinite."

Peter Goodman recently retired from a career as a music critic, reporter, and editor at Newsday. He is the author of Morton Gould: American Salute (Amadeus, 2000).