The Del Tredici family circus.

"Snapshots," Tues., Nov. 18 at Merkin Concert Hall, 129 W. 67th St., (betw. B'way and Amsterdam Ave.), 212-501-3330, $25, 8.

I've been spending a lot of time lately digging my way through a suitcase of old family photographs, hundreds of shots of people I will never meet. The most striking are of my grandmother looking like a movie star on a California beach just a few years after WWII, from a time in her life she herself can no longer remember clearly. Except for the family resemblance, the memories captured in those small black and white images have little to do with me, but it's this lack of connection that makes the exercise so interesting. Photographs hold stories, real and imagined.

When the New York-based Elements String Quartet and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Del Tredici started kicking around ideas for a new commissioning project, they knew they wanted something unusual. Del Tredici suggested using photographs as a point of departure; from there the idea for "Snapshots" grew to include 16 composers writing, as the title implies, short works inspired by personal snapshots. Award-winning projection artist Wendall K. Harrington has designed a video display using the photographs that will be projected during the Tuesday's performance.

I'm generally suspicious of projection art that accompanies live music, wondering if the composer is in the audience somewhere chanting quietly, "That's not what I meant! That's not what I meant at all!" Del Tredici says that's what makes this project unique. "It gives the music a visual reality," he explains. "You're going to know what the composer was thinking about because you're going to see it."

The list of composers involved in the project is striking for its diversity, encompassing the sound worlds of musicians from Regina Carter to John Corigliano. Well into the rehearsal process, Elements violinist Evan Mirapaul says the quartet has been impressed by the depth and range of expression in the work that has resulted. The parameters for the commissions (one personal photo into three to six minutes of music) have both simplified and personalized the pieces. "They've each been their own little journey," he explains.

Some of the images are predictable: parents and children. Paul Moravec's Vince and Jan: 1945 is based on a photo of his parents holding hands in a restaurant during the early stages of their courtship. The resulting composition, he says, "is a dreamy fantasy on?fragments of 'I'll Be Seeing You,' their favorite song at the time?and ever after."

Others shied away from the sentimental and went for more abstract topics. Sebastian Currier tackled the image of sleep and dreams in his REM. "There's something captivating about looking at someone while they're dreaming," he explains. "The passivity of the body, the inertness of the face." It's an image that doesn't reveal the underlying action, which is what intrigued him. "A photo records the outside world, while music reflects inner states of mind," he adds. "A photo is inherently static, while music is active. The photo is the dreamer (here a photo of me sleeping), and the music is the dream."

Writing new work for a string quartet while operating under such time constraints has forced composers to leave behind the routines of standard musical structures and focus more on sensory exploration. "I like that," says Mirapaul. "[Audience members] don't have to be scratching their heads about where the fugue was." The quartet hopes that this new take will appeal to the usual crowd while leaving the door open to new listeners.

Though in many ways the program begs for explanatory program notes, Elements has decided to forgo them on the assumption that 16 new pieces of music and their accompanying images will leave the audience with enough to process in one night. No doubt they're right.