When Jennifer Higdon was asked to write a major work in celebration of the Philadelphia Orchestra ’s centenary in 2000, she looked to Béla Bartók and his Concerto for Orchestra as her model. More than half a century separated the two works. Bartók's Concerto - the work of a displaced refugee near the end of his career - was a life summation and the composer's assertion about the power of life, even as he contemplated the end of his days. Higdon's Concerto - the work of a promising American composer entering career maturity - was a statement of youthful exuberance and hope for the future, even as she celebrated the past - the Philadelphia Orchestra's venerable history and Bartók's creative genius .

On this episode of NowSound, Jennifer Higdon's Concerto for Orchestra is seen in the light of its inspirations - conscious or floating in the ether - in its common threads and artistic divergences from Béla Bartók's masterwork.

Claude Vivier was a troubled soul - petulant, isolated, terrified of the dark and continually brooding about death. Rejected as an infant by his unknown parents, he was consigned to a Catholic orphanage and adopted at age 3 by a working class Montreal family named Vivier. He was sent to a number of boarding schools and found a refuge in music at a school run by the Frères Maristes.

Vivier's music - inspired by Gregorian chant and his travels through Asia, obsessively haunted by themes of alienation and death, and touched by hints of mysticism and magic - was a reflection of his personal turmoil and an expression of his profound faith. He was murdered in Paris at age 34 by a male prostitute he brought home from a bar - an early death that may have been a self-fulfilled prophecy and that, inevitably, has lent extramusical poignance to his art.

Yet independent of any facile sentiment in his life story , Vivier's musical voice was unique and inventive. On its own terms, his music was dramatic, exotic, mysterious, full of life and color - and would have been as touching and as powerful had its composer lived to be 99 and died quietly in his sleep.

Claude Vivier, man and artist, was always searching; his music sounds like the art of an experimenter - or better, an explorer - always revealing new things. Yet despite his personal insecurities, he was a creative spirit who was resolutely confident in the truth of his musical vision.

It could be said of the composer Daniel Catán that he was born a century too late and died far too many years before his time. To his detractors, Catán was hopelessly retro, hopelessly sentimental, hopelessly nostalgic for a smoldering pre-Modern style that reigned and resigned well before he was born – a composer out of place and at odds with his time. His own affinities ran to a musical language of opulent harmonies and defiantly Romantic melodies from the turn of the previous century.

But for Catán, the point of his music wasn't to fit in with the current stream or to cut out a revolutionary path. It was to spin stories of magic, mystery and romance in a cozy, familiar language.

When she landed in the German city of Hamburg in the mid-‘80s to study with the expatriate Hungarian composer György Ligeti, Unsuk Chin was a young student from Korea trying to find her voice in the language of post-war European avant-garde. Her new mentor had nothing flattering to say about that language or her efforts to speak it, and for three years, she underwent a creative crisis that left her unable to write a note of music.

If her arrival in Europe was a source of culture shock, the fish-out-of-water anxieties of Lewis Carroll’s child heroine, Alice Liddell, must have found resonance with Chin. At the least, Alice has offered the composer a recurring source of musical inspiration all throughout her career and possibly, shown the way to her own creative voice. Beyond her “Alice” works, Chin has crafted a solid body of concertos for solo and group instruments over two decades, at once adding her voice to an old musical form and at some extramusical level, examining the dynamic between the individual and the crowd.