One Angeleno is coming to share his wisdom with the next generation of artists at UCLA.

Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Michael Abels will speak at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music’s Lani Hall on Thursday as part of the Center for Musical Humanities’ eighth annual UCLA Robert U. Nelson Lecture Series. Although he completed his education at the University of Southern California, Abels said his musicianship comes before any cross-town rivalry.

Ahead of his lecture at UCLA, Abels spoke with the Daily Bruin’s Reid Sperisen about his latest musical project, his career in film compositions and his advice for students aspiring to pursue the arts.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Daily Bruin: Your piece “At War With Ourselves: 400 Years of You” will be performed Feb. 15 at the Wallis. What does this mean to you and what do you hope the UCLA community will take away from this piece?

Michael Abels: This piece is a song cycle of songs that are sung by a choir and accompanied by the Kronos Quartet. The piece that they’re performing, along with the choir Tonality, is based on a poem by Nikky Finney, who’s a National Book Award-winning poet, and Nikky is actually going to be there to narrate as well. What I realized is there’s a song in every line of her poem. In a poem that is only about a page long, we managed to get 15 or 16 different songs. In doing that, it helps you as an audience member – me as an audience member – really meditate on the meaning of each line and understand its significance. The piece is a commemoration of the 400th anniversary of people of color arriving in North America. That history has been painful, as well as wonderful, but certainly with many painful chapters. But also, while it references that history, the poem, it also gives me as a composer a great opportunity to reference all the different genres of American music that were influenced or downright invented by people of color, so the music includes ragtime and jazz and rock. This will be the Los Angeles premiere. As an Angeleno, I really am very proud of this work. It’s a very moving piece, and I’m thrilled to finally have it here, performed at my hometown.

DB: You have composed the scores for several acclaimed films, but perhaps most famously for Jordan Peele’s critically lauded films, “Get Out,” “Us” and “Nope.” How has your process changed and evolved over time as you continue to work on the music for high profile projects like these?

MA: When you’re in the arts, there’s really no rules. The best art breaks the rules in some way. Identifying what the rules are is actually the most important part of your work, especially if you’re going to switch from one thing to another. For example, in film, I’m composing music, but what I really am is I’m a storytelling consultant. I’m consulting about how to tell the story most effectively with music to a storyteller, namely a filmmaker, whose job it is to tell the story. I’m really aware of thinking about what the definition of good, effective music is in each situation before I even begin. Because I do that, I’m able to get to the goal of good music that’s working more quickly than I would have years ago.

DB: With you mentioning how you’ve worked across multiple genres when composing for different projects, is your process affected by the development of particular themes that you and the filmmaker are working to communicate in the story?

MA: That’s part of storytelling, and really every story, but particularly Jordan Peele’s films, which are so rich in subtext on even more levels than I’m aware of. I’m sometimes in the middle of working on a Jordan Peele film when I realize there’s a level of interpretation that’s going on that I didn’t even catch. And of course, Jordan was way, way out front of that and got all that at the beginning. That’s a particular gift of his artistry. Those themes are really important to his storytelling, both the ones that you might get on the first watch and the ones you wouldn’t get until the third or fourth watch. And I’m aware of them as I can be, and if I don’t get them in my own interpretation, he fills me in to make sure that I can write with full knowledge of what the scene represents. That absolutely affects the music. Sometimes a scene would seem completely innocuous were it not for the music telling you that something’s wrong. A change of music can have you looking at a very seemingly simple scene for like, “What is it that I’m not getting about this? What should my sixth sense be attuned to?” The thing that most often does that is the music, and that choice is a huge storytelling device.

DB: What advice would you give to UCLA students who are interested in pursuing a similar career in composing music and scores for film, television or theater?

MA: Don’t limit your vision of success to only one picture. You may have someone out there who you look at their career and you say, “I’d love to do that.” Well, there’s a great chance that you can do that, but there may be many different venues and platforms and situations in which you could actually be successful at that thing that are in no way the way the person you’re admiring is doing it. The way you’re going to do it, I could almost guarantee you will be different than the way you imagine. You need to manifest the dream in as many different situations as you can imagine – and even some you can’t – because that’s actually how it’s going to happen. The other thing is, being an artist is a calling. You are an artist when you declare yourself an artist. If you are an artist, you’re going to create art, and you’re going to do that regardless of whether it’s your primary income. I know that if I hadn’t done that for the years that it wasn’t my primary income, I would not be able to say that it is my primary income today.