COMPOSER'S MUSIC TO GO NATIONAL\T.O. resident creating work about Kennedy.

Byline: Enrique Rivero Daily News Staff Writer

Ron Nelson was more than a bit surprised when renowned conductor Leonard Slatkin asked him to compose an orchestral piece for the National Symphony.

"I nearly fell over," Nelson said.

A retired Brown University music professor who divides his time between Thousand Oaks and Scottsdale, Ariz., Nelson will compose a piece for Slatkin's first season as music director of the National Symphony in the John F. Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.

"This is a daunting task," said Nelson, 66. "Slatkin is the best American conductor now, at least in my opinion."

Slatkin is just as enthusiastic about Nelson, whom he calls the "quintessential American composer" and praised for his ability to move between conservative and newer styles with ease.

"The fact that he's a little hard to categorize is what makes him interesting," Slatkin said.

Yet Nelson sees himself as well within the conservative camp, eschewing the avant-garde and harkening back to the forms pioneered in the 1930s to 1950s by Aaron Copland and other greats.

"My style in music has been and still is conservative," he said. "I still love harmony and rhythm. I stayed with my aesthetic principals throughout my life."

Nelson knew from his earliest years that he wanted to be a composer. "There was never any question in my mind what I would do," he said.

He wrote his first piece, "The Sailboat" - "an awful piece," he said - at the age of 6 with the help of a teacher who taught him notation.

He enrolled at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y., where he earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees, emerging in 1956 with a doctorate in composition.

He was preparing for one of two career options: either in Hollywood, composing music for feature films and television, or in academia.

Nelson had a Hollywood connection in his cousin Wilbur Hatch, who composed the music for CBS, including "I Love Lucy."

"As fate would have it, in 1956, when I graduated, the movie industry was hunkering down because of television," he said. "So a lot of composers were unemployed."

He scored a few projects that were so minor he can barely remember their titles but decided it would be better to find a job in academia.

He wrote "101 letters" to schools and colleges throughout the nation and got replies from two: one in Walla Walla, Wash., the other from Brown University in Providence, R.I.

He took the job at Brown, where he taught theory, counterpoint and orchestration until 1993.

He said his 37 years at the school was an unusually long time for an academic to remain at a single institution. The explanation for this is simple: His style relied on harmony, while the "musical orthodoxy" of 1960s and 1970s academia was a harsher form that has since died out. As a result, no one else would hire him as a composer.

"I didn't embrace the styles that dictated success in academia," he said. "My style did not give me currency at other schools where I would have considered going. In other words, I was out of step."

Though he did get some offers for administrative posts, he turned them down. "I don't like to fire people," he said.

Still, he served as chairman of Brown's music department from 1963 to 1973. During the last three years of that period he didn't write a single piece, a love he sorely missed. That all changed when he gave up the chairmanship.

"As soon as I resigned it was like an arrow shot with a bow, the amount of creativity that developed," he said.

He subsequently published 130 pieces. In 1982 alone, his peak year, he published 18 pieces, he said. "It was almost like I built up a head of steam during those frustrating years and let them rip," he said.

About two years ago, he learned that Slatkin had picked up one of his pieces, "Savannah River Holiday," to perform with the New York Philharmonic. It was a piece he had written as a senior at the Eastman school.

Slatkin performed the piece again at the Grant Park Festival in Chicago and at the Blossom Festival in Cleveland with the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra.

He met Slatkin in Cleveland, where Slatkin suggested that Nelson should write a new piece for the conductor.

"I said yeah and left. I shrugged it off to a very nice gesture from a very nice and civil man," he said. "Then the call came, and he was as good as his word."

He was asked to write the piece for Slatkin's Sept. 28 premiere as well as a fanfare for the Kennedy Center's 25th anniversary celebration in October.

Slatkin said he was looking for composers who could be inspired by inscriptions pertaining to the arts in the Kennedy Center and who were contemporaries of the late president.

"He really embodies the time when the Kennedy Center was built and Kennedy's time, and I thought the words would have a meaning for him," Slatkin said.

Nelson said he has a lot of ideas for his composition but has yet to sit down to put it all together. "I've got the main theme, I've got a lot of the textures down," he said.

He said the piece will be inspired by the Kennedy legend, containing a tragic dimension while ending on a triumphant note.

He has the very first sound, which he describes as a quiet, "semi-intense" sound. The keys will be G major and F major, which he said will give his piece a floating, unsettled quality. And he intends to end the piece on a positive note.

"There's a real feeling of optimism at the end," Nelson said. "It goes through a lot of stress, but the outcome will be positive."

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Photo Ron Nelson Music is a lifelong pursuit