Leonard Bernstein has been an increasingly important inspiration to Daniel Asia; each man needed to find a way to become both a composer who is American and a composer who is Jewish. The only specific Bernstein thumbprint Asia has allowed into his music, however, is an increasing joy in the swinging rhythms of American popular music. This rhythmic vitality is the driving force in Gateways, which Asia contributed to the Cincinnati Symphony's 1994-1995 centennial celebration, a gathering of 24 new fanfares (the orchestra's last big fanfare push, in 1943, gave the world Aaron Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man). The brief piece's syncopated, brassy oom-pah rhythms; employment of instruments in separate choirs; and angular high spirits owe less to Bernstein, though, than to Igor Stravinsky. And Asia freely admits that he borrowed Gateways' final blast from The Rite of Spring. The title Gateways, by the way, alludes both to the piece's multiple, can't-decide-which-way-to-go beginnings and to Cincinnati's old motto, "Gateway to the West."

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