By Pierre Ruhe

For the AJC

It’s sometimes said that Robert Shaw gave the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra a beating heart. Yoel Levi gave it discipline. Robert Spano, music director since 2001, has established a culture where ear-friendly living composers are regular guests — and often draw rapturous applause.

Two of those distinguished voices headline ASO concerts this week in two world premieres: Jennifer Higdon’s “On a Wire” and Michael Gandolfi’s “Q.E.D.: Engaging Richard Feynman.” Mozart’s Symphony No. 39 fills out the program.

Both living composers already have been commissioned and recorded by the ASO: Higdon’s “City Scape” premiered in 2002 and is a musical depiction of Atlanta, with its trees and roads; Gandolfi’s “The Garden of Cosmic Speculation,” from 2007, takes inspiration from a geometrically eccentric Scottish garden.

Both Higdon and Gandolfi are market leaders in what’s now firmly the norm in 21st century American classical music. A generation ago, even a decade ago, composers who wrote music specifically to please an audience were often labeled panderers or trash.

Higdon, 47, and Gandolfi, 53, reject that negativity: Their music is tonal, usually hummable, often rhythmically alive. They’re not retro or neo-Romantic, but they are alert to popular styles from the 20th century, from Debussy and Stravinsky to Hollywood and the Minimalists.

Although they both teach at prestigious schools — Higdon at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music; Gandolfi at Boston’s New England Conservatory — neither write for what’s dismissively labeled “academically protected styles” (a term used by influential Berkeley musicologist Richard Taruskin).

Instead, Higdon and Gandolfi write for the concert hall and regular symphony audiences. Their music is highly digestible on first listen. In sum, these composers are not experimenters but craftsmen who work largely within the boundaries of what audiences already know and like about classical music.

“I still get colleagues who accuse me of selling out,” Gandolfi said. “But I love what I write, and I get all charged up when I hear it. I tell them if they’re writing for their teachers and colleagues, and don’t really like their own music, then they’re the ones selling out to some trend that’s already dead.”

This week’s world premieres are the latest in what the ASO bills as “the Atlanta School,” a slippery grouping of disparate-sounding composers that conductor Spano has championed over his decade as ASO music director.

“They are a school,” Spano insisted, “as in a school of fish that swim together, and what their music has in common is that it is tuneful, tonal and inspired by world and popular music.”

Unlike an official “composer in residence” program at some orchestras, said Spano, “there is no contract here, it’s ten years of collaboration — we play their music, we commission new works and then record those works.”

Finding success

Whether by aesthetic inclination or career strategy, the payoff has been impressive. Higdon and Gandolfi have commissions aplenty from top ensembles into the foreseeable future.

Higdon, especially, is on the fastest track. She was awarded the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for music earlier this year, for her Violin Concerto, and she rivals heavyweight John Adams — another ASO regular — in frequency of performances and commissioning fees.

Higdon’s new ASO work, a co-commission with five other organizations, from the Cleveland Orchestra to the Cabrillo Festival, is an unusual concerto called “On a Wire.”

It’s written for the ASO and Eighth Blackbird, a six-member group that specializes in wet-ink music and is based in Chicago. In “On a Wire,” they will perform as a unit, or as soloists, or blend with the orchestra — a refreshed take on a popular Baroque form called the concerto grosso.

“Jennifer’s music blends a lot of elements in music that we love,” Blackbird flutist Tim Munro said. “There’s bracing virtuosity, an imaginative sound world and, maybe most importantly, she has us take the audience on a journey. You feel the sense of movement and journey and closure, and she does it with sweeping Copland-esque sounds to funky to jazzy.”

For her part, Higdon said, “I gave the orchestra rather traditional parts, nothing too funky, but the Blackbirds get all sorts of lines thrown at them, with bird mimics and extended techniques.”

Gandolfi’s inspiration for “Q.E.D.: Engaging Richard Feynman” for chorus and orchestra started when he was a teenager, reading “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman,” a rascally and poignant memoir by the Nobel Prize-winning physicist who died in 1988.

Searching for a text two years ago, Gandolfi hit on Feynman videos on YouTube. A colleague created a libretto by poaching lines from diverse poets — Gertrude Stein, Whitman, Emerson and others — and reassembled the words as if the poets were together at a roundtable, discussing topics from Feynman’s lectures on quantum electrodynamics (or QED).

It’s more evidence of Gandolfi’s attraction to not just the natural world — something Beethoven explored in his “Pastoral” Symphony — but to a highly organized, precise and comprehensible image of nature. In short, not a naive view but a modern and perhaps American view.

“Richard Feynman, as a personality and for explaining the theoretical physics as a really beautiful and wondrous thing, pushes all my buttons,” said Gandolfi.

“And it’s my responsibility as a composer to write music that I find deeply satisfying — so the musicians will get the sincerity and transmit that to the audience.”

Pierre Ruhe is classical music critic of www.ArtsCriticATL.com .

Concert preview

“On a Wire” by Jennifer Higdon and “Q.E.D.: Engaging Richard Feynman” by Michael Gandolfi

Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus. 8 p.m. Thursday and Saturday and 3 p.m. June 6. Symphony Hall, 1280 Peachtree St. N.E. 404-733-5000, www.atlantasymphony.org .