It might be said that Daniel David Feinsmith was born to be a composer. His family's musical legacy stretches back to the 1600s, he says, every generation including Jewish liturgical musicians and sacred music composers. Feinsmith's grandfather was a clarinetist with the New York Philharmonic under Toscanini. His father, Marvin Feinsmith, was a composer and a bassoonist in the New York Philharmonic and Israel Philharmonic, and his mother, Deborah Feinsmith, was an oboist in the Israel Philharmonic and New York's Little Orchestra Society.

Now living in Emeryville, Daniel David Feinsmith was raised on classical music and studied composition with John Corigliano, a family friend. "Just barely" a high school graduate, Feinsmith says, he studied classical music privately. But in his 20s, Feinsmith took a detour: He became a Zen monk, studying with teachers in New Orleans and New York for several years. "A lot of what I do as a composer now flows out of that period of time," he said in a recent interview. "It stabilized my ability to perceive certain things and to become open in certain ways."

A product of this journey is Elohim, which the composer's newly created Feinsmith Quartet will debut Dec. 8 on opening night of the 12th annual Other Minds Festival at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco. The 45-minute festival commission is dedicated to A. Jess Shenson, a Bay Area arts supporter who died five years ago.

Like so many of Feinsmith's works, Elohim — a Hebrew word meaning, roughly, divinity — reflects spirituality from East and West, which Feinsmith's Zen studies helped him bring into focus. "Within the being-time of the composer, the grand unit of listening and writing, listening and writing, is equally a function of mindfulness and presence as it is of imagination," he wrote recently on his blog.

Feinsmith's interest in spiritual music drew him to San Francisco to visit friends who had moved from New York. One day in 1998, he attended a concert by Terry Riley, a composer he'd long admired. "His music blew me away," Feinsmith recalls. Until then, his training had been entirely in Western classical music, but, mesmerized by what he perceived as the great purity and deep spiritual dimensions of Riley's Indian-tinged sounds, Feinsmith embarked on a six-year course of study with the guru of West Coast minimalism. Riley turned him on to a form of yoga that involved chanting long tones. The experience transformed Feinsmith's experience of sound.

Feinsmith applied his new Zen-centered focus to his family's musical and spiritual legacy. He was to base many of his pieces on Biblical characters, such as Solomon, but in addition to the Jewish liturgical thread, his father, Marvin, a member of the Beat generation, had studied the writings of D.T. Suzuki, Alan Watts, and others, "so I had that exposure," he says.

Then about two years ago, Feinsmith reached another turning point. Violinist David Harrington commissioned Feinsmith to write for the Kronos Quartet, urging him to compose something based on whatever was most meaningful to him. Feinsmith set his sights at the highest level. "As a composer, I believe that everything comes from grace," he explains, "and my whole function is to become more open to the grace of the Creator, allowing the creative function of God to flow through me from moment to moment." He resolved to focus on the Supreme Being. Yahweh, his composition for Kronos, is titled after another of the many Jewish names for the deity, like the rest of his recent works.

"The process of doing that had a purifying quality," Feinsmith says. "I felt closer than I ever had to God, and it's brought me to places I hadn't expected." Picking such a lofty topic raised his creative ambitions. "I can't see naming a piece after, say, a mathematical principle, or a Shakespeare play, as much as I enjoy those things," he says. "I can't see myself doing anything if it doesn't have an association with God." What will he do when he runs out of names? "I've been worrying about that lately," he admits with a chuckle.

Feinsmith notes that while you can't hear overtly Christian elements in Bach's instrumental works, they're suffused with an uplifting spirit that flows from the composer's ultimate source. Similarly, you won't hear obviously Jewish modes in Feinsmith's music, but it nonetheless reflects his spiritual passion. And just as many of Bach's compositions are believed to employ numerological devices, Feinsmith bases some of the melodic rhythmic elements of his latest works on numerical concepts. In Hebrew, each letter also stands for a number. For example, "Elohim" has the number 86, and other names for God have other numbers.

Feinsmith's music also conveys his respect for the virtuosity and influence of Jewish composers and musicians. "I'm deeply inspired by the great Jewish virtuosos of the 20th century, including Itzhak Perlman, Vladimir Horowitz, Yehudi Menuhin, Jascha Heifetz and even my grandfather," Feinsmith writes, adding that their experiences with "a hostile Europe" led them to play their instruments "with a pathos that only such a life could instill."

Other Minds is the ideal venue for the debut of Feinsmith's new work and new quartet. The festival resolutely avoids the kind of thematic programming so trendy among new — and old — music institutions. Instead, its theme comes from its home, a city acclaimed, and sometimes damned, for its diversity and free spirit.

"San Francisco is a maverick city, founded by gamblers and explorers and other shady characters," explains Other Minds founder and artistic director Charles Amirkhanian, the venerable West Coast new music impresario. He cites such iconic composers as Henry Cowell, Lou Harrison, and John Cage. A dozen years ago, Amirkhanian resolved to create not just a performance series but also a congenial four-day confab where composers can have "a meaningful exchange of ideas" with each other and audiences, he says. He chooses composers for both their innovative music and their openness to interaction — that is, "other minds."

Rather than assigning an annual marketing theme, Amirkhanian bases each edition of Other Minds on a few constant principles. To facilitate mentoring, he likes to mix established and emerging composers. To channel San Francisco's maverick tradition, he looks for outsiders, often women and minority composers. And to encourage diversity, he seeks a wide range of compositional voices, united only by their unconventionality.

To express his own unconventional voice, Feinsmith has chosen a quartet of players who, coincidentally or not, echo various aspects of his lifework. They are former Kronos cellist Jennifer Culp, Terry Riley's guitarist son Gyan Riley, and bassist Michael Manring. They're from the Bay Area. Number four, pianist Christopher Taylor, like Feinsmith, hails from New York. Music samples are at the group's Web site.

Their Other Minds debut is just the beginning: The Feinsmith Quartet has booked gigs into 2008. Daniel David Feinsmith has always had a divine inspiration for his music. Now it appears he'll have a definitive outlet for it, as well.

(Brett Campbell writes about music for NewMusicBox and other publications, and covers West Coast performing arts for The Wall Street Journal.)