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UCLA. Three years later he joined the Universitys Music Department and eventually rose to the rank of Emeritus Professor. In 1963 he organized the Festival of Contemporary Music, which featured music and lectures by Luciano Berio, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Leonard Stein. His international reputation received a boost in 1966 when he was awarded the first International Prize of Milan for Structures Sonores. In 1970-71, he completed seven major works while serving as artist in residence for the West German government in West Berlin. With the completion of his residency in Berlin, Lazarof returned in 1973 to UCLA, where he was named Artistic Director of its Contemporary Music Festival that year. Since that time works flowed from this diligent, hardworking composer who is always honing his considerable craft.

For many years Lazarof had been quite taken with the artwork of the great Russian painter, Wassily Kandinsky, the seminal figure in the evolution of abstract art. After an initially negative reaction to the non-representational quality of French impressionist painters at an exhibition in 1895, Kandinsky came far to exceed Monet and his colleagues in transcending the boundaries of realism. The child of musical parents, Kandinsky learned the piano and cello while young and had a profound feel for music. He once said that colour is the keyboard, the eyes the harmonies, the soul the piano with many strings. Like Scriabin, he posited a strong connection between colour and musical harmony, associating tone with timbre, hue with pitch, and so forth. He claimed to see colour when he heard music. Kandinskys beautifully crafted abstract paintings manifest a rhythmic vibrancy that reflects his sense of a musical-visual nexus. Perhaps it is that musical quality of his art that reinforced Lazarofs connection to Kandinskys works. A spur to the composers decision to translate his resonance to the artist came from pianist Alexis Weissenberg, who encouraged Lazarof to compose a large orchestral work, a kind of fresco. With the support of Gerard Schwarz and the Seattle Symphony, which commissioned Tableaux, Lazarof travelled to Paris, Munich and New York City, where he viewed hundreds of Kandinskys painting. The resultant orchestral score is a bold, multi-hued tapestry of stunning instrumental colours, with textures ranging from the spare and intimate to the richly layered and voluminous.

Discography