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"  It starts with a sound. Buzzing. A buzzing cricket. That is the sound. The beginning of the song. It gets an electronic note. And then another. And another. Until there is a literal cacophony of electronic crickets. These are given a color, a code. And then Ricardo Romaneiro moves on. This time it&amp;#039;s the water outside the lighthouse in which he heard the cricket. Maybe for this he&amp;#039;ll create a synthetic tone. Water. Synthetic water. More notes, another color. Then the orange moon. The moon will be a vocal. And the stars, perhaps a glockenspiel. Then come the harp and the percussion and bass.  The final composition will be performed by an orchestra. They will get a version in the conventional sheet-music form orchestras have been reading since the days of Bach. But not Romaneiro. He&amp;#039;ll be in the back. Spiked hair escaping gravity, dual Macs open, watching the colors on his screen, making sure every synthesized beat hits the right shade.  And you, in the audience? First, you&amp;#039;ll be transported to the lighthouse in Montauk, New York. Then you&amp;#039;ll catch your breath. You&amp;#039;ll wonder what the hell a twenty-eight-year-old Brazilian kid is doing mashing a classical composition with world beats and synthesizers. If you ask him, he&amp;#039;ll tell you he was born for this. He had no choice. When his parents gave him his first guitar, he had to play it, and he had to play his own songs. Nor was there a choice when his family moved back to his native country. He had to stay in America. He had to learn music. So he lived alone in a townhouse in Princeton, New Jersey. He was sixteen. And he learned and went on to Juilliard.  And now? Well, now he is breaking all the rules of composition: merging the rhythms of the street with his classical training, writing orchestral compositions on tools meant for the turntable. Again, there is no choice. He likes all genres of music -- electronic, pop, classical -- and so he combines them all.  With few exceptions, the traditionally staid classical-music world has embraced Romaneiro. His work has been commissioned by ballet companies and dance troupes and orchestras around the world. The Museum of Modern Art&amp;#039;s summer garden series. The Colorado Ballet. The Shanghai Conservatory. As for those few who think he breaks too many rules? &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m not worried about what people are thinking,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m writing the music I want to write. If I stop doing that, then why should I be a composer?&amp;quot; At right, Romaneiro annotates his latest song, &amp;quot;Lighthouse,&amp;quot; which he wrote -- along with three others -- in honor of the Best and Brightest issue. The album, called Esquire Afterhours, is available at iTunes and can be heard at esquire.com/romaneiro.  1 &amp;quot;Every composition begins on a computer program called Sibelius, in which each note is written just as it would be on paper. One great thing about composing on a computer is that I can play back the notes as I write them. As here in &amp;#039;Lighthouse,&amp;#039; my inspiration often begins in nature. I hear, see, or smell something and interpret it into a note.&amp;quot;  2 &amp;quot;Each melody, theme, or chord for each instrument is then &amp;#039;rewired&amp;#039; into a separate program called Reason, where they are color coded. The patterns interact with each other, forming the structure of the piece. This is often how I &amp;#039;hear&amp;#039; and tweak a composition -- in color -- adding, rearranging, and restructuring patterns as I see fit.&amp;quot;   3 &amp;quot;Next are the synthetic instruments or recorded beats or instruments that won&amp;#039;t be played live. I pick, fine-tune, and record all of these in my studio on a program called Cubase. I also mix all the levels and EQs here. And again, each component is given a color code.&amp;quot;   4 &amp;quot;The last step is rewiring everything into Ableton Live. Because every instrument and sound is in one place, I can follow the colors as the orchestra performs on the traditional sheet music I&amp;#039;ve printed out for them from Sibelius. Meanwhile, I manually add in the synthetic and recorded sections as their respective colors appear during the performance.&amp;quot;  ***** Read more of the Best and Brightest 2007 "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a3945/romaneiro1207/>