When the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra performs at Carnegie Hall on Saturday night, it will offer musical experiences that haven't been encountered in that iconic venue before -- a work from 2005 by imaginative American composer Steven Mackey, and a concert led by vibrant American conductor Marin Alsop.
That the New York-born Alsop, the BSO's music director, will be making her Carnegie debut with this event comes as a surprise; that she is showcasing contemporary music on the program does not.
Although she performed many times at Carnegie as a violinist, starting in her teens, with various orchestras and ensembles -- "I know how to sneak in and everything," she says -- this marks her first appearance there as a conductor.
"Even people at Carnegie thought this couldn't be my debut," Alsop says from her dressing room at Meyerhoff Symphony Hall. "This is really a pinnacle moment for me. I'm so psyched."
When she was planning the BSO's program for this occasion, one of her first concerns was the choice of a guest artist. "I wanted to have someone really dynamic and not overexposed to death," she says.
Colin Currie, the brilliant Scottish percussionist, came to mind. He and Alsop have frequently collaborated in this country and abroad.
And once Currie was on board, it was a short step to the music of Mackey, whose Time Release for marimba and orchestra was premiered by Currie in 2005.
"I have to confess I haven't done a lot of Steve's music yet," Alsop, 51, says. "But I like his stuff. I find him to be a very interesting, intriguing composer and person."
For his part, Mackey is looking forward to being in Baltimore for the rehearsals and a "Composers in Conversation" event with Alsop, as well as the performances here and in New York.
"This will be the first time I've worked with Marin," says Mackey, 51, who praises her commitment and informed approach to new music.
"She will be the first American conductor to do Time Release, and that will make a difference," Mackey says. "Americans have a different sense of rhythm."
Currie, 30, who has performed the work in Scotland, Holland, France and Sweden, describes it as "an American piece. So it will be exciting to play it for an American audience," he says from a San Francisco hotel.
Often, the American-ness of a Mackey composition makes its impact through the use of rock music idioms, or strong jolts of humor.
His output includes a couple of electric guitar concertos, a chamber ensemble piece titled Feels So Baaad, and a big orchestral work called Eating Greens that involves an onstage pizza delivery partway through.
Time Release, though, "isn't particularly quirky or funny," Alsop says. "It's quite conservative for him."
Currie calls it "a more reflective piece. It achieves intensity through subtlety," the percussionist says.
Time Release -- the title refers to the duration of the sounds made by a marimba -- is an expectation-defying score.
Although essentially a marimba concerto, it requires the soloist to employ a lot of other percussion instruments. And the work doesn't have the big, showoff cadenza so common to the concerto genre.
"I'm not interested in that," Currie says. "I told [Mackey] I wanted a really, really serious piece with no recreational side. It is an extremely difficult piece. My job is to make it sound easy. I feel like he poured his heart into this work. He has really pushed the envelope."
Mackey, born to American parents in Germany, grew up in northern California, where he developed his keen interest in electric guitar and rock bands. His career as a composer has been going strong since the 1980s.
Classifying Mackey isn't easy. "I'm often referred to as being 'rock-tinged,' which gets in the way," he says from a ski resort in Lake Tahoe, where he was vacationing. "It would be nice to have a name for my music, not that I have one to suggest."
Maybe "maverick" would describe it best.
"I don't try to mix rock and classical," the composer says. "It's just mixed up at the DNA level."
The genetic makeup of Time Release reveals an unexpected element, one Mackey describes as a "breakthrough" in helping to fashion a musical language for the piece.
"I was preoccupied with 16th-century counterpoint, how one line affects the other, how this note moves when that note moves. After years of teaching it" -- Mackey joined the faculty at Princeton University in 1985 -- "it became an influence on me."
Not that Time Release would ever be mistaken for a long-lost Vivaldi concerto.
"I'm playing by slightly different rules than in the 16th century," Mackey says, without emphasizing the understatement.
"I felt I lucked into a musical language that was resonant [of the past], but didn't borrow that much from tonality. It was something I had never heard before," he says. "I was really surprised."
Listeners may be surprised, too, as they follow the nearly half-hour progression from a first movement marked "Stately" through rhythmically complex, sonically prismatic sections, ending with a coda labeled "Alleluia."
"That's very direct music," the composer says of the finale. "It uses the simplest of melodic elements. It's emotionally direct."
It's also very Mackey. The "Alleluia," he says, "goes off the rails at the end, instead of bringing it home, the way a traditional Alleluia would."
Taking the nontraditional path comes easily for someone who grew up on the outside of conventionality. As a teen, he used to improvise on the electric guitar for hours while his older brothers took LSD.
"I never did acid," Mackey says. "But when I would play for my brothers, I would smoke pot. In the late '60s, early '70s, there were ambitions of being transcendent. The rock music I was listening to was pretty out there: The Beatles' White Album, Captain Beefheart. The crazy, psychedelic sounds, the strobe lights, black lights and incense -- it all went together with the pot-smoking."
All of his young experiences "capture where I'm coming from," Mackey says. "It would have been much different if I had been going to Handel's Messiah and light operetta with my parents."
It remains to be heard where Mackey's musical impulses will take him next. But, as Alsop says, "There really are no boundaries for him."
tim.smith@baltsun.com
Events with Steven Mackey
The BSO performs at 8 p.m. Thursday and Friday at Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, 1212 Cathedral St. $15 to $57. 410-783-8000, bsomusic.org. Also, 8 p.m. Saturday at Carnegie Hall, 57th St. and Seventh Ave., New York. $26-$88. 212-247-7800, carnegiehall.org. "Composers in Conversation," with host Marin Alsop, will feature Steven Mackey at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday at the Theatre Project, 45 W. Preston St. $10. 410-783-8000, bsomusic.org.