Long after his wife and two daughters fall asleep, Mathew Rosenblum dons headphones and composes contemporary music at a computer for a new, multimedia chamber opera called "Red Dust."

	Martha Rial, Post-Gazette Heath Lamberts, left, and Rick Kemp perform "Tricycle Power," a portion of their work "e-lectricity," at the Pittsburgh Playhouse. The actors, who studied clowning in Paris, are in residence at Point Park University's Playhouse Repertory Company to work on a performance piece that explores society's dependence on technology. Click photo for larger image.

By 7:30 a.m., David Stock grips a pencil and, on paper, writes a concerto for clarinet, an idiosyncrasy that elicits hoots of laughter and regular teasing from younger, more techno-savvy colleagues.

Heights terrify Phat Man Dee, but she is attempting a high-wire act of sorts: She's writing an opera based on Jewish folklore and collaborating with Pittsburgh Opera, an endeavor several stages removed from her old circus routine of eating glass.

Jackie Dempsey, a classically trained musician and composer with Squonk Opera, has never written music for a narrative play. Later this fall, Dempsey will immerse herself in the intricacies of a revenge drama called "Dog Face," which Quantum Theatre will stage here in 2005.

This summer, as curators brainstormed about ways to rehang all of the works at The Andy Warhol Museum, Steve O'Hearn joined the conversation, weighing in on whether Barcaloungers should be placed strategically in the six-story building. O'Hearn is also designing a new piece of installation art for the museum that will address Warhol's pop art legacy.

In their clown show called "e-lectricity," Rick Kemp and Heath Lamberts portray two idiots who attempt to outdo one another in a junkyard of jettisoned electrical appliances.

To take risks, artists need all manner of luxuries they usually cannot afford. Unfettered time. Sufficient space. A trusted mentor from an established arts group to critique and nurture their work, help produce it and furnish an audience and venue for it. Plus an angel such as the Howard Heinz Endowments to finance the artist's endeavor with a grant ranging from $5,000 to $40,000.

All of these components are present in the Heinz Endowments' Creative Heights program, which began three years ago and was designed to foster collaboration between individual artists and local arts groups by encouraging them to become partners to produce new works.

"Two-thirds of the money goes to the artist, and one-third goes to the nonprofit to repay them for working with the artist," said Janet Sarbaugh, program officer at the Heinz Endowments.

In 2004 and 2005, seven projects are in various stages of development. Since the program began, 13 artists have received grants and the Heinz Endowment has spent a total of $395,250.

Here are the works in progress:

Jackie Dempsey

	Andy Starnes, Post-Gazette Squonk Opera mainstay Steve O'Hearn, left, harnesses the part of Daedalus and Jackie Dempsey shoulders Icarina in their costumes from the piece "Rodeo Smackdown." The actors are actually standing; the costumes create the illusion of flight. Click photo for larger image.

Dempsey, of Turtle Creek, has been composing since she attended college at the University of Pittsburgh. Writing music and sound to accompany a narrative play is a new challenge for Dempsey, who is accustomed to working with fellow collaborator Steve O'Hearn. Since 1992 the duo has produced eight original works for Squonk Opera. A classically trained musician who plays the piano and the accordion, Dempsey knows how to meld music, stage and set design to create a new type of theater that uses narrative sparingly. That's what Dempsey and O'Hearn have done for the past 12 years.

This fall Dempsey will work with Dan Jemmett, who adapted a Thomas Middleton play from the 17th century into a new work called "Dog Face" that has played to packed houses in France. The play is performed in French but at the urging of Karla Boos, Jemmett has agreed to stage it here in English.

"Karla is known for her site-specific work," Dempsey said, adding that "Karla creates a world everywhere she does a show."

Depending on what site is selected, Dempsey said, she may use the sounds normally heard at that location, record them and perhaps even distort them before using them as live sound in the performance.

"I've never used environmental sounds in composing," she said.

Steve O'Hearn

Andy Starnes, Post-Gazette With the help of a Heinz Endowments Creative Heights grant, Squonk Opera's Steve O'Hearn and Jackie Dempsey are each entering new realms: Dempsey is composing music and sound for a 17th-century play and O'Hearn is looking into new ways to rehang The Andy Warhol Museum's collection. Click photo for larger image.

O'Hearn, a co-founder of Squonk Opera, possesses visual as well as musical talents. He plays the wind synthesizer, the Irish flute, the saxophone and the Tyrolean many-belled trumpet.

"I'm mostly a novelty act," O'Hearn joked.

He finished a sculpture this summer that was recently installed at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center. The sculpture, titled "Between Big and Small," features 12 sections of stainless steel spread over 900 feet of a hand rail on the building's fourth-floor terrace. Visitors may run their hands over the rail and trace the topography and buildings that are visible on the other side of the Allegheny River.

"It's a scale model of the Allegheny Valley. The convention center is about 1 1/2 inches wide. So, Downtown Pittsburgh's about a foot long. It speaks to issues of scale -- how tiny we are in the universe and how big we are when we stand in front of this model. The model allows us to imagine ourselves as giants," O'Hearn said.

This year, O'Hearn, who lives in Irwin, plans to spend hours watching Andy Warhol films, researching the artist's work and trying to imagine how the museum of this century could look.

The Warhol is aiming at an audience of young adults and high school students. Most museums tend to favor children and adults in their 40s.

"There's much ambiguity in my potential roles. I'm interested in performance, exhibit design as an industrial designer and creating public art," O'Hearn said.

He will work with a team of curators as they rehang the museum's entire collection.

Mathew Rosenblum

Martha Rial, Post-Gazette Composer Mathew Rosenblum works in his studio on the third floor of his Squirrel Hill home, where he is creating a multimedia chamber opera called "Red Dust." Rosenblum, who is collaborating with the Opera Theatre of Pittsburgh, is one of the 2004-05 recipients of a Creative Heights grant from the Heinz Endowments. Click photo for larger image.

As grant recipients push the limits of their potential, they also challenge audiences.

"This is the most substantial piece I've undertaken," Rosenblum said, referring to "Red Dust." "It's an hour long, and it has so many elements to it. It's stretching myself quite a bit."

"Red Dust," he added, "will turn the typical operagoer 180 degrees" because the work combines spoken words with singing, video on three screens and music played in "surround sound."

"It won't be your father's opera," the composer added.

In a spacious third-floor studio of his Squirrel Hill home, Rosenblum said, "I work at odd hours, from 7 to 2 or 3 a.m."

Sometimes he gets up from the computer keyboard and rifles through a table laden with books or listens to operas by other composers.

For the first time, Rosenblum is combining his music with video by collaborating with Kurt Ralski, a videographer who creates computer software that manipulates real images in real time.

Texts are also a source of inspiration. Rosenblum spent hours in the Library of Congress, where he listened to recordings of Gertrude Stein reading her own poetry from "Portraits and Prayers."

He is using micro tones, intervals smaller than the space between two notes on a piano's keyboard, to capture the subtle inflections in Stein's rhythmic prose.

To structure the opera, Rosenblum is relying on dream sequences excerpted from a Chinese novel called "The Dream of the Red Chamber." That's because the opera explores what is real and unreal, what is conscious and unconscious.

Rosenblum also will use an erotic bathtub scene from another Chinese novel called "The Plum in the Golden Vase."

In March 2005, Opera Theatre of Pittsburgh will perform a portion of "Red Dust" at Carnegie Mellon University with the school's contemporary music ensemble. The work requires three singers, one dancer and 18 musicians. A company called Sequitur will perform "Red Dust" at the Miller Theater in New York City in 2006-07.

David Stock

	Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette Pittsburgh composer David Stock works in the study of his Squirrel Hill home. Click photo for larger image.

Stock's warm eyes beam behind his large, aviator-style glasses when he recalls his days with the Pittsburgh Youth Symphony Orchestra.

While playing in the orchestra during the 1950s, Stock met his wife, Celia, who teaches the Suzuki violin method. The orchestra, made up of student musicians, played his first composition, "Divertimento," and in 1978 performed another composition called "Zohar," which means "splendor" in Hebrew. Stock also spent a year conducting the orchestra.

All summer long, he has composed a clarinet concerto. In November 2005, Stock's good friend, Richard Stoltzman, who has been called the Yo-Yo Ma of the clarinet, will play the new composition with the Pittsburgh Youth Symphony Orchestra.

By 7:30 a.m., Stock is at work in a small, third-floor studio in his Squirrel Hill home, where one wall is devoted to a collection of 3,000 records.

He composes at a keyboard and writes his compositions by hand.

"I'm not going to change," Stock said, adding that this particular process works for him. He also takes time out to walk his dog, Simcha, an energetic bichon frise that curls up near his feet during an interview.

Stock's new concerto is designed to be played by a virtuoso of the clarinet but the composer has tried not to overdo the level of difficulty in the parts played by the orchestra.

"Some parts of it are going to be quite challenging," he said, adding that the piece contains some complex rhythms.

As you read this story, Stock is beaming over his fifth grandchild, Elena Belle Mayo, who was named for her two grandmothers. The 65-year-old grandfather composed a blessing for the child that his daughter, Sara Stock Mayo, gave birth to this summer. Mayo will sing the blessing today during a naming ceremony for her newborn at Temple Sinai, where she is the cantor.

Phat Man Dee (Mandy Kivowitz-Delfaver)

Martha Rial, Post-Gazette Performance artist Mandy Kivowitz-Delfaver, also known as Phat Man Dee, entertains a guest with a Spanish love song at her Allentown home. Kivowitz-Delfaver is using her Creative Heights grant to write the libretto for an opera titled "The Dybbuk" in collaboration with Pittsburgh Opera. Click photo for larger image.

Phat Man Dee's first performance at Benedum Center involved a starring role in Pittsburgh Opera's Maecenas Ball, an annual fund-raiser.

"They put me high on a swing in the Benedum," Phat Man Dee recalled. "I'm terrified of heights. I was halfway up. I had to wear a seat belt."

Now the singer is writing the libretto for an opera based on "The Dybbuk," a story from Jewish folklore. A dybbuk is a restless soul that takes over the body of a living person and talks through the person's mouth.

"I'm Jewish. I like the idea of a partly Yiddish opera," Phat Man Dee said during an interview at her home in Allentown.

In the opera, which is set in a Russian village during the 1850s, a poor rabbinical student named Khonnon falls in love with Leah. Her father agrees that Leah will marry Khonnon, but later breaks that contract and marries her off to a rich man.

As soon as Khonnon learns Leah will marry someone else, he dies. But his spirit inhabits Leah's body just before the wedding ceremony begins under the chuppah, a canopy that symbolizes the four walls of the home the couple will build.

In order to play the part of Leah, Phat Man Dee said, "I had to write it. Who's going to cast a little bald, tattooed girl? I'm possessed under the chuppah. I want to wail. I want to spin. I want the spirits to come in."

Phat Man Dee is working on the opera with her colleague, drummer Daveed Korup of North Carolina, and David Crowe, who is scoring the music for orchestra.

"We're halfway through the libretto," Phat Man Dee said, adding, "That's just a fancy word for lyrics. "Why shouldn't the next great opera come out of Pittsburgh?"

For the past three years, Phat Man Dee has studied with Beth Claussen, a voice coach who lives in Highland Park and needs little encouragement to perform. Seated on a jeweled fuchsia chair in her living room, she sings a 16th-century Spanish love song with a high level of control and expression.

Rick Kemp and Heath Lamberts

	Martha Rial, Post-Gazette Heath Lamberts, left, and Rick Kemp struggle with the Ball of Everything, part of their work "e-lectricity." Click photo for larger image.

When Rick Kemp asked Heath Lamberts if he wanted to create a clown show, the pensive actor agreed.

As the two men brainstormed ideas over breakfast at a Strip District diner last summer, Lamberts told Kemp, "I see a ball of Gordian knot."

(Gordius, a legendary king, tied the knot and a prophet said that whoever unraveled it would rule Asia. Alexander the Great used his sword to cut the knot in half.)

Lamberts' remark made perfect sense to Kemp, who said, "That's fantastic. Let's make the show about electricity."

After all, creating new work is a bit like unraveling the tight knots of thought and inspiration intertwined in every actor's brain, which is a bit like e-lectricity, the name of their show.

While electricity has freed most of us from unimaginable drudgery, Kemp said, "it minimizes the amount of face-to-face communication. The transfer of information is not communication."

Kemp and Lamberts are creating "devised theater," which means the performers write their show through improvisation and some collaboration with the designer of sets and costumes. The two men are collaborating with Point Park University's Pittsburgh Playhouse Repertory Company.

Separation and unity are major themes in the clown show.

"An audience laughing together creates temporary unity," Kemp said.

Working in a studio at Pittsburgh Playhouse, Kemp and Lamberts will employ metaphor, joy and all the talents they honed while learning Jacques Lecoq's method in Paris.

To be great clowns, the men said, they strive to be open, naive, simple, optimistic and playful.

"It's a state of being rather than a technique, like juggling," Kemp said, adding that "courage and risk are involved."

During their 75-minute show, Kemp and Lamberts will wear tuxedos. On Dec. 15, the first-night audience is expected to show up in formal evening dress, too.

"After all the work we've put in, that's the least the audience can do," said Kemp, smiling wryly.