RICHARD Tognetti wants this made absolutely clear.

Yes, the Australian Chamber Orchestra, as part of a program involving Schubert and Brahms, will be performing a piece by the composer Jonny Greenwood. Yes, that's the Jonny Greenwood who has a day job as the floppy-haired, noise-making guitarist of Radiohead, the most adventurous rock band of the past 20 years. But no, his Radiohead gig is not why his work for string orchestra, Popcorn Superhet Receiver, is on the orchestra's program.

Composing himself...Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood.

Greenwood is there ''because of the piece rather than being a famous rock composer. Otherwise we could have chosen someone even more famous on which to hang the marketing flag,'' Tognetti says, suggesting with a slight shudder in his voice Paul McCartney's classical excursion Ecce Cor Meum as an example of the bums-on-seats choice one could make if quality wasn't your criterion.

And anyway, pulling in the pop fan with a pop name can go quite wrong. ''I don't mind people enduring things. These days it's good for people to be on a hard bench and to endure things, in the Lutheran sort of sense,'' Tognetti says jovially. ''But if they are going to be enduring things and complain during the concert, we are staring into the mouth of the monster. It has happened in the past; when we collaborated with Neil Finn, we went to great pains to say this is a collaboration and we don't know what the music will sound like except that it will not sound like Crowded House. And still we got people saying: 'Why did they play all that shit?' ''