For composer and musician Christopher Brubeck, the route to orchestral music has been a circuitous one.

He's played jazz bass with his legendary father Dave Brubeck, worked as a rock musician, and has explored R & B, funk and folk music.

In the past decade, though, he's been composing orchestral music, blending his diverse range of stylistic influences into a distinctive musical language.

"My eclecticism used to be shunned," Brubeck, 55, said. "And now it's valued."

Nevertheless he remains somewhat at odds, if in a competitive sort of way, with what being an orchestral composer generally means.

"I can guarantee you that the Niles and Frasiers (Cranes) of the world will be deeply offended by whatever I do," said Brubeck, who's had works commissioned or performed by the Boston Pops, the Czech National Orchestra and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, among others.

Last month, "Quiet Heroes," his piece for orchestra and narrator based on the book "Flags of Our Fathers" had its premiere in Wisconsin.

This weekend, as part of the Brubeck Festival, Brubeck makes his return to the Stockton Symphony with the world premiere of a new work called "Music Is the Power." The piece combines orchestra, pop soloists, small jazz combo, and 200-plus choristers from the Stockton Chorale, University of the Pacific, and Delta College. The program concludes with Beethoven's monumental Symphony No. 9. Peter Jaffe conducts.

At the heart of "Music Is the Power" lies text and imagery written about music by San Joaquin county students. Funded by a Music Alive grant to work with Jaffe and local musicians, Brubeck's goal was to engage directly with students through their feelings about music. The first phase of the project was a set of songs performed at area high schools last October.

"There were about 1,000 different entries," Brubeck said, who also premiered "Mark Twain's World" with the symphony in 2005. The schools narrowed that to around 300 works that were sent to him in Connecticut, where Brubeck began setting them to music.

Looking through them all he quickly zeroed in on works that satisfied what he called his "intuitive barometer" as to what could become a workable song lyric. One poem, titled "Music is My Getaway" and written by Weston Ranch High School student Shelby Cornell, immediately stood apart.

"The first time I read through the 300, this one jumped out," he recalled. "I was like, 'Wow, this is almost a really good song.' "

With a little tinkering it eventually became the second movement of the new piece. "It's mostly her lyrics," said Brubeck. "It turned out to be a very beautiful song."

Brubeck orchestrated two other songs and wrote a new opening movement, a more traditional piece for chorus and orchestra featuring words by Weston Ranch student Nicolas Gerst, for the performances this weekend. The third movement is reggaelike, and the final movement sounds, according to Brubeck, "like a giant version of Gladys Knight and the Pips," referring to the famed Motown vocal group.

"Instead of three Pips," he noted wryly, "there will be 200 Pips."

Being paired with the likes of Beethoven's Ninth with its dramatic choral finale is still a bit of an intimidation though. According to Jaffe, programming that symphony - for better or worse it's the most famous symphony in the repertoire - raises the difficult question of what to put in front of it.

"Peter called me and said they were doing that this season and how did I feel (about being on the program)?" Brubeck said. "Since the tunes I had written were driven by lyrics ... having a choir was attractive."

"So I thought, 'Oh what the hell,' " he said with a laugh.

Yet, the two works share an exploration of music through words that are explicitly about music. "Beethoven's Ninth is famous for having its Ode to Joy," said Brubeck, "but also it's famous because it has some rather 'vulgar' elements like the drinking, beerhall song that got in there."

"In a way that combination of highbrow classical elements and lowbrow people's music is sort of what I'm doing, too," he said. "We're both celebrating the joy of music."