LOS ANGELES TIMES - L.A. Philharmonic's young composers program fine-tunes talent

It wasn't B.J. Thomas, exactly, but musical raindrops seemed to be falling in a white-walled rehearsal room next to Walt Disney Concert Hall, courtesy of Milo Talwani, one of the L.A. composers least likely to write melody, let alone ear candy, into a piece of music.At 16, he's one of four area high school students taking the royal road to composing careers, at least at the outset, via the Los Angeles Philharmonic.Talwani, a lanky epitome of precocious Bohemian-intellectual cool who's a junior at the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts, had placed pizzicato plinking sounds that evoked the first spatterings of a cloudburst into a musical fragment from a work in progress. It was being given its first test run by the Calder Quartet, a string ensemble that over the past 15 years has gone from USC undergraduate beginnings to international acclaim.Download PDF | Full Article