Composer Nico Muhly is one of the hottest names in contemporary classical music. (The Royal Conservatory)

This week, celebrated conductor Gustavo Dudamel and Venezuela's Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra made their Canadian debut at the Four Seasons Centre in Toronto. The arrival of this 28-year-old classical ace — one of Time's 100 Most Influential People, and the winner of this year's Glenn Gould Protégé Prize — caused quite a commotion in the media. But Duda-mania points to a more significant development in popular culture: classical musicians are the new rock stars.

'I like thinking about music as food: the first and most important criterion is that you want to eat it. That helps get rid of a lot of unhealthy preconceptions.'

— Composer Nico Muhly

A leading exemplar of this trend is Nico Muhly, the charismatic 28-year-old composer who has been championed as a boy wonder in both pop and new music circles. An elfin charmer who was mentored by Philip Glass and boasts a Master's Degree in Composition from Juilliard, Muhly already has a striking CV. He has just finished an opera titled Two Boys for the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and was commissioned to write two pieces for the Britten Sinfonia. But his arrangements can also be found on albums by pop innovators like Bjork, Antony and the Johnsons and Grizzly Bear.

"My emotional home is in the random," Muhly explains in a recent interview. He prefers not to think of his work as "fusion," referring instead to a process of "shared dialogue" between experimental classical and experimental pop.

"I like working with my friends, people my age who are doing something beautiful. Now, there are people who try very hard to define themselves as indie-rock-meets-classical artists, but you can smell the desperation on them. My well-rehearsed but still relevant answer is that genre is as interesting as where you were born — my background in a classical tradition is as germane to my work as the fact that I come from Randolph, Vermont.

"I like thinking about music as food: the first and most important criterion is that you want to eat it. That helps get rid of a lot of unhealthy preconceptions."

While some grumpy traditionalists don't care for his approach — he recently engaged in a war of words with two British critics after they pooh-poohed two of his pieces that debuted at London's Barbican Hall — Muhly's still in high international demand. He's about to tour a number of countries (Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands) — but this week, he's in southern Ontario for a pair of performances with the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony (one in Kitchener, one in Toronto) dubbed "Nico's Choice."

"As with most things," he begins, "this started with a random phone call. I'd known about [Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony director] Edwin Outwater for years as this young rising star. He got in touch with me and asked if I'd be interested in working with this crazy orchestra in the middle of Canada, of all places."

When we spoke, Muhly was walking through a garden party on the FOX Studios lot in Los Angeles, Calif., where he was in talks about writing music for a new film. If you saw The Reader, you've heard Muhly's urgent, emotionally charged music. While Hollywood contracts may help pay the bills, Muhly insists he'd "start to get anxious" if he only wrote ballet and film scores. Projects like "Nico's Choice" help balance out his dance card.

"I wanted to present an evening of music I loved, but it didn't seem fair to only present music by dead people and myself. I thought, 'Who do I know who can write music who's amazing and is Canadian and can come keep me company way up there?'"

His answer? Richard Reed Parry, a rock star (he's a member of Arcade Fire and the post-rock band Bell Orchestre) with a sideline in classical music. ("Owen Pallett was too obvious a choice," Muhly laughs.) Parry rose to the occasion with a fascinating composition called For Heart and Breath and Orchestra. In order to perform the piece, the members of the K-W Symphony are equipped with stethoscopes. Each musician reads Parry's scored notation, but plays in sync with his or her own cardiac rhythm.

"For a long time, I've been sitting with the idea of writing music where the involuntary parts of the human body are directly linked into music," Parry says over the phone from New York (where he's recording string arrangements for the forthcoming Arcade Fire album). "The three easiest examples being heartbeat and lungs and blinking, though I haven't done anything with blinking yet. I wanted to take a bit of the John Cage experience of letting things happen as they will, but transform that into an engaging piece of music."

Richard Reed Parry's newest work uses heart rate as a compositional element. (Hannah Johnston/Getty Images)The biggest challenge, Parry says, was how to organize a composition where the tempo is entirely dependent on uncontrollable factors. A self-taught bassist and graduate of Concordia University's Electroacoustic Studies program, Parry was determined to avoid creating an exercise in sheer chaos.

"I had a vision of it being a pointillist, slow-moving stop-and-start thing," he says, "but I had to figure out how to write so that it would hold together. This piece uses the conductor's breathing as a constant rhythmic regulator."

Muhly has yet to hear the fruits of Parry's labours, but says, "I'd imagine it sounding something like if you were to put a bunch of bells on the floor and then release a bunch of cats into the room. What you'd hear is the result of their weird cat itineraries. You'll end up with this constellation of sound."

Muhly cheerily acknowledges that For Heart and Breath and Orchestra could turn out to be "a total disaster," but is optimistic about the potential in Parry's vanguard work. Though well aware that listeners (and players) might be horrified by the prospect of a symphony using involuntary bodily responses to guide their performance, he seems excited about the way this conceptual piece forces Outwater and his orchestra to place their trust in the composer.

"In the classical world, if the result and process are delicious and accessible, then people won't object. It's really no weirder to strap on a stethoscope than it is to strap a viola to your body.

"I think percussionists are model musicians," Muhly adds. "They play a wide variety of instruments, they're expected to interact with new objects on an ongoing basis, and they don't ask questions. If they have to play a Chinese gong that you lay on a piece of felt, they'll do it, and if they have to learn how to play a squeak toy for dogs, they'll do that too — and it will probably be quite affecting."

Muhly, Parry and the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony perform Nico's Choice in Kitchener on Oct. 28 and in Toronto on Oct. 29.

Sarah Liss writes about the arts for CBC News.