A composer doesn't have to be dead to be in the limelight. These days, some star soloists and conductors are pushing the works of composeres who are alive, well and still writing.

IT'S A GRANITE FACT of a composer's life that music doesn't take place on the page. Even after that last double bar has been written and the date of a work's completion ceremonially inscribed, the score exists only as an abstract idea. Desk drawers all over the world are filled with theoretical symphonies and silent operas, but the composer becomes a true creator only when symbols become sound.

For much of the last half-century, carrying out that metamorphosis was considered a secondary task, best left to specialized technicians. The bulk of new-music performances took place in cloistered settings, with audiences of connoisseurs and musicians who prided themselves on being able to satisfy the composers' most excruciating demands. But the last couple of decades have transformed that situation, as a perceived crisis in classical music has proved to be an opportunity. Some enterprising performers have interpreted the decline in the educated listener as license to assume that audiences have few preconceptions. Where nobody is famous, neither is anybody obscure. Suddenly, the unknown, living composer has a fighting chance.

The vast majority of performers still draw their repertoire from the ranks of the dead, but a few star soloists and conductors have yanked living composers into the limelight. The violinist Gidon Kremer tirelessly pushed the music of the late Alfred Schnittke while the Russian composer was alive. The cellist Yo-Yo Ma has championed some fresh voices, and his new Silk Road Project has commissioned pieces from a far-flung slew of unknowns. And while the orchestra world as a whole tends to be deeply suspicious of composers who still walk the Earth, several of America's leading conductors-Michael Tilson Thomas, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Christoph von Dohnnyi, Leonard Slatkin and James Levine-have powerful attractions to and strong tastes in today's music.

Even specialized new-music performers, who once had to eke out sustenance at the margins of the concert world, have now lured a public that comes to hear them play, regardless of what's on the program. It's the Kronos Quartet that sells tickets and CDs, not the legions of composers who have furnished the group with material. Most startlingly, the Scottish percussionist Evelyn Glennie has drawn new crowds into the concert hall for a novel genre: the percussion recital.

A phenomenal musician who crams the stage with instruments and then imbues them with an unsuspected expressive range, Glennie has made it clear to her public that living composers are indispensable to her art, since not many of the famous dead ones wrote for solo percussion. It helps that part of her appeal lies in sheer choreographic spectacle. She glides, barefoot, across the stage with motions as meditative and precise as those of a t'ai chi artist, glittering in her rocker pantsuit, her face obscured by effusive auburn hair. She prowls among her forest of instruments, finding objects to shake and tap and dunk in buckets of water, or else dances, dervishlike, from one end of an oversized marimba to the other, hurling mallets at the keys.

That visual theatricality is an inescapable part of Glennie's act, but others have adopted it as a deliberate strategy for packaging new music. Bathed in changeable dramatic lighting, loosely linked by a narrative thread and staged by a director, the concert now often becomes a show.

The Gogmagogs, a troupe of London-based string players, fiddle at full tilt while they skip, dip, contort, converse and clomp across the stage in flippers. In "Gobbledygook," which the group performed at Columbia University's Miller Theater last fall, bass player Lucy Shaw slings her oversized instrument on her hip and plunks it on the move, giving new meaning to the term walking bass. A cellist keeps placidly bowing as he slowly climbs a stepladder. The performance is a marvel to watch, and sometimes astonishing to hear as well, though the group has sacrificed a measure of musical finesse and commissioned easy scores.

In New York City, combining new music with theater is beginning to look like a movement. The 5-year-old ensemble Sequitur, run by lawyer- turned-composer-conductor Harold Meltzer, presents an annual cabaret of new and newish songs in a vast range of styles linked by a visceral theme: "Songs of Sex and Solitude" in 1999, "Money" in 2000 and "Power" next fall. Composers have gravitated to Sequitur's ethic of eclecticism and its strategy of visual music. For a Merkin Hall concert on Feb. 27, for example, Randall Woolf wrote "The Trick Is to Keep Breathing," a piece that involves a string quartet, a contralto, a "turntable artist" recruited from the club scene and a stage director.

Impurity is the point. Sequitur measures its success not by the approbation of new-music initiates, but by the number of unfamiliar faces in the crowd. Meltzer points with pride to the flocks of ticket buyers who migrate to his events from an interest in dance, theater and visual art.

In a similar vein, the pianist Anthony De Mare has spent 20 years trying to merge his powerful virtuosity at the keyboard with his training as a singer, dancer and actor. Had he been of a less experimental bent, DeMare might have gravitated to Broadway, but instead he has coaxed composers into expanding the repertoire for multitalented pianist. The ever-willing Woolf supplied him with "Limbs Akimbo," which asks the pianist to rise from the bench and tap- dance. De Mare's standard tour de force is Frederic Rzewski's

"DeProfundis," in which the pianist recites from Oscar Wilde's jailhouse journal and sings in a pale falsetto croon, all the while playing the dark, sometimes staggeringly virtuosic notes.

De Mare's extended pianism culminates in May with a solo show he describes as "concert theater" and that he has given the unfortunate title of "Playing With Myself." Working with a director, Sal Trapani, he has arranged a baker's dozen piano works-from avant-garde classics of the 1940s by Henry Cowell and John Cage to freshly inked music made to order-into a story of a man discovering the piano.

While a critical mass of performers has begun creating shows out of music rather than merely reproducing scores, composers, too, have gone onstage, either in the belief that they are their own best salesmen or because their inspiration emerges out of the physical act of making music. The Korean composer Jin Hi Kim came to the United States in 1980 bearing her komungo, a traditional Korean zither. Soon, she had adapted the instrument to its new surroundings- collaborating with electric guitarists, electrifying the komungo and composing music that bridges the Pacific Ocean. Her dark, meditative pluckings merge the blues with ancient lunar rites and sound like nothing else.

Like a rock and roll auteur, the English composer Steve Martland has built for his music a tight, electrified corps of flexible musicians devoted to playing what he writes. The Steve Martland Band is one of several griffinlike new-music ensembles (the Bang on a Can All-Stars in New York City and the Berkeley, Calif.-based Paul Dresher Electro-Acoustic Band are others) that combine the electric guitar, bass guitar and drum kit of a rock band with a selection of classical instruments. "Kick," on the band's debut CD (due out this spring on the Black Box label), opens with an explosive chord and a quiet, burbling marimba. Immediately, an Elizabethan fiddle melody cycles through a thickening, ever-more-raucous accompaniment, frantic with hiccupping rhythms and lurching changes of pace.

Like so much music in these eclectic times, the piece is saturated with influences. Echoes of Jethro Tull, minimalism, TV-show house bands and jazz-rock fusion groups such as Weather Report are held together by dint of sheer ensemble virtuosity. In a sense, Martland has picked up a tradition founded in the 1960s by such SoHo denizens as Philip Glass, Steve Reich and Meredith Monk, for whom writing music and performing it were intertwined activities.

Glass wrote simple, repetitive patterns that matched his own modest keyboard capabilities. Reich drew on his experience studying drumming in Ghana. Monk discovered that she could give her voice a remarkable gymnastic flexibility, and tailored vocal music to suit it. It took decades before other musicians absorbed their styles to the point that the composers did not actually need to be present for the performance to sound right.

The 32-year-old American composer and clarinetist Derek Bermel recalls the much earlier model of virtuosos such as Rachmaninoff and Kreisler, who kept themselves supplied with flattering showpieces. Bermel's "Theme and Absurdities" is a short, dizzying clarinet solo that spins off into fanciful pyrotechnics, weaving in bits of cartoon grotesquerie, angular modernist gestures, Benny Goodman swoops, baroque filigree, drunken glissandos, klezmer riffs, operatic high notes and theatrical dialogues between the high register and the low. The whole thing ends with a note of humor and hope, trailing off with the sunrise opening of Strauss' "Also Sprach Zarathustra."

This sort of activity inhabited the fringes of the concert world a generation ago, and much of it still takes place in the dingy basement spaces of lower Manhattan. But increasingly, even some formerly stodgy institutions have taken notice of new music. Bermel's "Theme and Absurdities" opened the first concert of "A Great Day in New York," an extended festival of recent music made in New York City that was co-produced by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and Merkin Hall. Perhaps the most significant thing about that event was that of the 50-odd featured composers, all local and alive, the majority also has had works performed at the quintessential establishment emblem: Carnegie Hall.

WHERE & WHEN

Evelyn Glennie appears in recital with pianist Emanuel Ax at Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall March 25 as part of the "Great Performers" series. For tickets and information, call 212-721-6500.

Sequitur presents a program Feb. 27 of "American Mavericks," including Randall Woolf's "The Trick Is to Keep Breathing" and Sam Shepard's play with percussion "Tongues," at Merkin Hall, Abraham Goodman House, 129 W. 67th St., Manhattan. For information, call 212-501-3330.

Derek Bermel's selected songs are featured in the Feb. 4 installment of the new-music festival "A Great Day in New York" at Alice Tully Hall. For information, call 212-875-5788. His music is also featured at The Kitchen, 512 W. 19th St., Manhattan, March 1-3 as part of the "House Blend" series. For information, call 212-255- 5793.

Anthony De Mare's solo concert theater work "Playing With Myself" takes place May 3-6 at Here, 145 Sixth Ave. (at Spring Street), Manhattan. For information, call 212-647-0202.

Jin Hi Kim will headline a program at Joe's Pub at the Public Theater, 425 Lafayette St., Manhattan, March 9, as part of the "Composers Out Front" series presented by the American Composers Orchestra. For information, call 212-239-6200.

Discography

Evelyn Glennie: "African Sunrise/Manhattan Rays"
(Black Box) with Dave Heath. Due in March. "Shadow Behind the Iron Sun" (RCA). Solo improvisations: "Drumming" (Catalyst),
"Street Songs" (RCA), with the King Singers.

Anthony De Mare:
"Wizards and Wildmen" (CRI). Music by Charles Ives, Henry Cowell and Lou Harrison. Frederic Rzewski/Anthony De Mare (o.o. Discs). Includes "De Profundis."

Jin Hi Kim: "Komungo"
(o.o. Disc). Just komungo, electric and not. Due in March. "Komunguitar"
(o.o. Discs). Kim on komungo, with various electric guitarists.
"Living Tones" (o.o. Disc). Chamber works with Asian and Western instruments.

The Steve Martland Band:
"Steve Martland Band" (Black Box). Debut CD, due in March.