The Harvard Band: A Wind Ensemble?

In this country, music has had to rebel continually against its social trappings. College choruses did in the 20's; now the band has served notice that it too wishes recognition as an artistic, not an athletic, enterprise. If such an attempt is to succeed, the traditional fare, the medleys and marches, must be grouped together on the program so that they do not debase the seriousness of the major works. The latter must be of high enough quality to stand out clearly above them. And that is just what did not happen on Friday night.

The wind ensemble has become a standard medium in this century. Its instruments offer a limited range of tone color, but the fullness and buoyancy of their sounds are ideal materials for manipulating sonority. The most successful piece in this regard was Howard Hanson's Chorale and Alleluia. Its combinations of woodwinds and brass were quite exhilarating, and all the more so because James A. Walker, the band's new conductor, shrewdly separated parts of each choir at various points on the stage. As throughout the evening, entrances were not uniformly clean, but the dissonant sonorities were well executed.

Yet the sonorousness of the wind ensemble also encourages bombast and superficiality. A band can boom out a double forte very impressively, but too much of it makes music facile and eventually annoying. There was too much melodrama on Friday night's program, and none of it was particularly memorable because it remained flashily evocative rather than intense and expressive. Many of the works thus resembled too closely just that music the band wishes to make secondary.

Holst's First Suite for Military Band has a few attractive folk tunes but moves along with commonplace ostinatos and harmonies; Clifton Williams' Concertino blusters with some excitement and nothing more. And the empty pomposity of William Latham's Proud Heritage makes one proud of nothing at all. The performances, nonetheless, were clean and the band's sound maintained that peculiar vitality which good wind playing must have.

If these pieces did not exploit the expressive possibilities of the medium, Alan Hovhaness' Tower Music did More than any other work, it had the stamp of a personal style. The loneliness of the Tower Music's themes and open fifths recalls the same composer's Mysterious Mountain. Unfortunately, it lacks the other's movement and contrasts: chord progressions march ponderously, and the melody must try awkwardly to mitigate the resulting heaviness. Nor did the performance help to contribute any motion or variation, although some nuance was apparent, especially in an oboe solo.

Walker has admirably avoided transcriptions from other mediums, but the one he did choose showed just how bad the results of such adaptations can be. This, a Toccata, was written by Frescobaldi, but you wouldn't know it from the transcription. Like Stokowski's orchestral renditions of Bach organ music, the adaptation turned the freshness and grace of the 17th century toccata into trite 20th century melodrama. Walker added to the distortion by twisting the evenness of the melodic lines with Romantic nuances.

Two marches and a college medley interrupted the serious works. Although they showed the great capability of student conductor Peter Cobb, their dulling brassiness only emphasized the superficiality of much of the serious music.

Hearing on top of all that the Apotheosis from Berlioz's badly neglected Grand Funeral Symphony, I found even this unusual piece robbed of any great effect. Perhaps it is more impressive under better circumstances. At any rate, the band gave an extremely fine performance that had balance as well as grandeur.

I understand that this program was but a beginning for more ambitious things to come next year. The concert showed much of the desire and ability necessary to make the band a real wind ensemble, but the group will need better music if it is to pull the trick off.