Wagner and Radiohead share something other than grand sweeping music in different genres. They have both been transcribed for piano. Wagner by Franz Liszt, Radiohead by Christopher O'Riley.

O'Riley didn't do anything new with this. He continued a tradition that was already a long practice when Liszt did it, of musicians showing their appreciation for the work of composers by adapting it for their own instruments.

Transcriptions were probably most popular in the 19th-century, at a time when every home had a piano and many people were introduced to the latest symphonic music through piano transcriptions. Transcriptions of rock music are relatively rare, of course. Even if Radiohead is a rock ensemble with classical-music connections. Lead guitarist Jonny Greenwood also plays viola and other instruments, has composed movie scores (There Will Be Blood) and several symphonic works.

Composers and arrangers have also often reworked earlier music. Mahler, for instance, re-orchestrated Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 and several of Schumann's symphonies. Mozart re-orchestrated Handel's Messiah. Conductor Leopold Stokowski re-orchestrated Wagner and Bach. These become new works, in effect, since the re-orchestrations bear the hallmarks of the later composers and arrangers.

A more contemporary approach comes from the French chamber choir Accentus, which created mainly a cappella versions of instrumental music, such as Barber's Adagio for Strings, Prokofiev's The Field of Death and Debussy's piano prelude "Des Pas sur la Neige," this last set to verses by Rilke and Mallarmé. With these works, Accentus radically shifted one's way of hearing this music.

In this rock era, certain composers are inspired by the singer-songwriter generation in a different way. John Corigliano a few years ago reset Bob Dylan lyrics in his song cycle, A Prologue: Mr. Tambourine Man. The composer says he did not know the seven Dylan songs he chose as songs, but as poems (hard to believe that he would never have heard as ubiquitous a tune as "Blowin' in the Wind," but there you have it). He used Dylan's words much as a composer sets poetry.

This summer, audiences at New York's Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival can hear a preview of Daniel Felsenfeld's interesting new project, an evening-length song cycle, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. It's a re-setting of all of the lyrics from songs in the 1973 David Bowie film of the same title and the album that was released a decade later. It will be performed by the piano, cello and percussion trio Real Quiet. Next year, the trio, along with singers Petra Haden and Theo Bleckmann, will premiere the entire work and tour it throughout America and Europe.

Felsenfeld is quite familiar with the songs of David Bowie. Yet he is using his new setting as both an homage to the original work as well as an inspiration to create something new, as composers have used the works of others. I'm particularly interested in his version of "All the Young Dudes."

And I'm sure there are other songs of the rock era that contemporary composers might revisit. It's hard to imagine anyone improving on the Beatles, but who knows? Mahler felt it okay to re-orchestrate Beethoven. Perhaps someone might take a new look at Lennon and McCartney.