Craig Urquhart's name may not ring an immediate bell, but anyone who listens to National Public Radio knows his music. His piano compositions have been featured as transitional music for "All Things Considered" and "Morning Edition," as well as part of programming for nationally syndicated world and ambient music programs "Echoes" and "Hearts of Space." Urquhart frequently gets categorized as a New Age artist, although he is a respected composer of American classical art songs. He's created musical settings of poems by Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, and his songs have been recorded and sung by renowned baritone Thomas Hampson, among others.

"The term New Age is sort of a marketing thing. For someone like me, I'm a serious composer, but because I write very tonal music it's not taken completely seriously by the so-called serious composers," comments Urquhart. "When people think of classical music, up until very recently they thought of very atonal, ugly music. Because I just write piano, it seems like a good fit, the New Age market."

Urquhart's latest album, Evocation, is an expressive, moody work with themes that frequently allude to the power of the environment. Song titles like "Old Trees," "Wind Dance," "The Whale's Lament" and "Fruhling" ("Springtime" in German) are tempered with dreamier compositions like "Blues." The album's title comes from a group of piano pieces written by written by Spanish composer Isaac Albeniz. Urquhart's music is largely influenced by great classical composers like Shumann, Bach, Chopin and Mendelssohn, while also being inspired by contemporary artists such as ambient music master Brian Eno and songwriters Joni Mitchell and Laura Nyro.

"I draw on the rhythms of nature, because when you look at nature, you can get everything you need," he explains. "You have the rhythm, you have the color - I have an emotional relationship to nature. The rhythm of the ocean, the wind in the trees, and our harmonies and melodies - they all come from nature. That's one reason I like the piano so much - it's an organic instrument."

Urquhart has had quite a colorful career. He was Leonard Bernstein's personal assistant from 1985 until his death in 1990. As a kid, he grew up watching Bernstein's "The Young People's Concerts with the New York Philharmonic" on CBS and loved the way Bernstein leant an aura of glamour to the music. "Everybody else wanted to be a fireman or a policeman - I wanted to be like Bernstein," Urquhart chuckles. He began studying classical piano at the age of 6; his mother was the neighborhood piano teacher and taught her students on the family's Baldwin Acrosonic vertical piano. (These days he plays and writes on a Baldwin R1 Artist Grand that he's had since he was 14.)

His first composition was called "Sonatina in A Major," written when he was 8 years old and discovering that improvisation on the black keys was exciting. He won a blue ribbon at the Michigan state talent fair for the piece. As he matured, he started composing romantic pieces reminiscent of his future style - one was called "When the Waters Meet." Later he got into jazz and out of that came a song called "Skyline." In college, he began composing orchestral pieces and string quartets, but always came back to the piano as a grounding force.

After receiving his Master's degree in composition from the University of Michigan in 1976, he headed to New York City to pursue his professional goals and on a lark, left a cassette of his compositions, some scores and a handwritten note with Bernstein's doorman. A few months later, Bernstein's secretary called and invited him to a Friday afternoon concert. He met his childhood hero and started a long professional association with him. He was offered the job as his assistant six weeks later, but felt he wasn't a good fit for him - yet.

"I had just moved to New York and I was quite provincial, and I didn't think I was equipped to travel around the world moving Leonard Bernstein around. But I started doing music copying and we became friends," Urquhart says. By the time he started working with the maestro at the end of 1985, he was more worldly, having taught music and worked in music publishing. He was a member of the music faculty at the Harlem School of the Arts for 10 years, teaching piano, theory and composition before signing on as Bernstein's assistant. In 1984, he landed another intriguing job, as Tom Hulce's piano coach for the Academy-award winning film Amadeus. He worked with Hulce five hours a day, five days a week for a month, teaching the actor how to finger the songs he would mimic so convincingly as Mozart.

Urquhart's years with Bernstein were storied, and he has fond memories of their association. "The whole experience was really great - that fact that somebody so great was actually just so wonderfully kind and brilliant to work with," Urquhart remembers. It boosted his confidence and inspired him to pursue his own musical calling - "He was very supportive of my composing and my music-making and wrote a very nice letter of recommendation for me." They both composed music for each other, and one of Bernstein's published pieces is 'For Craig Urquhart,' part of Thirteen Anniversaries he wrote for piano.

Urquhart self-released his first album, Songs Without Words, in 1990, named for Mendelssohn's work of the same title. "A group of short pieces with provocative titles, that's my way of showing homage to the great masters," he explains. The Dream of the Ancient Ones followed in 1993, and Epitaphs and Portraits (1994) is a tribute written for friends and caretakers of people who died from AIDS. The issue is very close to him - he's been a musical activist, performing benefit concerts for organizations including the Tidewater AIDS Taskforce of Norfolk, Va., the Momentum AIDS Project in New York and the Bread & Roses AIDS hospice in Connecticut. "Thank God there's been so much progress in that field for AIDS treatment," he says. "It's not necessarily sad music, but it is melancholy and it also gets you in touch with your feelings."

Urquhart strives to reach his listeners on an emotional level. "I want my music to be expressive, and I want it to touch the listener and the performer and make them pause and connect with their soul. I don't necessarily want them to think, I want them to feel."