January 13, 2006

Bubble Music

By ANNE K. WALTERS

Although some have called him the maestro, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan probably wasn't thinking about music when he used the words "irrational exuberance" to describe the mind-set of stock-market investors in 1996.

For Robert W. Pound, then a doctoral student at the Juilliard School, the phrase struck a chord when he heard it on the news, and he knew he wanted to use it as the basis for a composition.

Mr. Pound, now an associate professor of music at Dickinson