Familiarity Breeds Respect

THE HARVARD GROUP FOR NEW MUSIC is a crusader for the performance and reception of contemporary music. The group's concert last Saturday night, which included works by Burton, Dautricourt, MacMillan, and Ives, showed that the battle is by no means won; even one of the evening's performers half-jokingly confided, "I'll be amazed if you like this; I know I don't." But at least he, like an increasing number of Harvard community members, was interested enough to take a first step toward modern music. And despite his words, the concert proved both commendable in the level of performance and thought-provoking in content.

The Harvard Group for New Music, now in its second season, was set up by music graduate students Lou Karchin and Paul Salerni for a dual purpose. First, they wanted to provide a forum for music written by composition students at Harvard, although each concert program also includes one masterpiece of contemporary music. Second, they were interested in getting Cambridge audiences past the "This stuff doesn't even sound like music" stage.

Part of the problem in appreciating contemporary music undoubtedly stems from a lack of familiarity. A listener can't really connect a modern piece with an idiom of style in the same way that even an unknown Romantic or Classical composition can be identified as Romantic or Classical. For one thing, most people don't have a background or vocabulary of contemporary music to relate to contemporary music that they are hearing for the first time. And there is no real contemporary style; trends in modern music are scdivergent that familiarity with one school may be of little help in evaluating the product of another.

Recognizing this need for repeated exposure to a complex piece of contemporary music, Karchin and Salerni programmed the same work to open both halves of the concert: David Burton's Serenata for 8 Wind Instruments, composed in 1971. Burton was a graduate student in music before his untimely death last year, and the Serenata shows a keen appreciation of the possibilities inherent in wind chamber music. In particular, winds rather than strings, by the nature of their instruments, are more suited to Burton's use of short, rhythmically changing yet repeated motives. If anything, the Serenata is too rhythmically demanding; for example, it is reasonably impossible to play six evenly-spaced notes in a measure of five beats, yet the score requires many such subdivisions.

ON ANOTHER TACK, Burton's piece also demonstrates contemporary music's diverse treatments of melodic lines and the 'flow' of a piece. The first movement proceeds by a multi-layered interlocking of individual wind outbursts, roughly comparable to a group of eight people taking turns reading successive words in a sentence. The second movement, in contrast, features a lyrical alto saxophone solo, with subtle accompaniment by the lower brasses. The quizzical third and final movement, however, takes the approach of 'white' sound--the musical term is meant to convey the combination of different light wavelengths into a perceived mixture of 'white' light--and perhaps sounds the strangest to the uninitiated ear.

The performance itself, although hastily assembled, was generally competent, especially in the first performance. Despite the formidable rhythmic difficulties, ensemble entrances were crisp, and intonation was tight and controlled. With the exception of the second movement, which tended to get a bit soupy, the overall interpretation was sensitive and careful.

The opening performance of the Burton was followed by Jean-Pierre Dautricourt's Elan I, II for two flutes, composed in 1976. The work is written in a stream of consciousness vein, although the development is in fact somewhat controlled. Nevertheless, Elan sounds almost aleatoric in places; that is, the actual notes played in any one performance are determined by the whim of the performer, although the catalogue of choices for these notes is usually written out by the composer.

Edward Schultz and Sadako Yukoyama, both former New England Conservatory students, realized Dautricourt's innovative conception of the flute's musical possibilities with considerable success. This is not at all as conventional as it sounds, for, more and more, composers like Dautricourt are requiring from wind performers new technical tricks such as playing two and three notes simultaneously, tone bending, quarter-tones or notes at smaller intervals than half-steps, and percussion effects.

The first half of the program closed with another graduate student composition, Alan MacMillan's 1972 Trio for violin, cello and piano. Probably the most conservative work on the program, the work features singing cello lines with delicate filigreed accompaniment from piano and violin. The trio's interpretation, which apparently left the composer, sitting in the audience, pleased but a little surprised, varied between reassured introspection and a nervous restlessness. Cellist Greg Colburn was particularly sensitive to dynamic shadings and tone coloration; however, it seemed as if the piano itself, a Bosendorfer, had a particularly warm sound that failed to mesh perfectly with the work's relatively dispassionate quality.

The bulk of the second half of the concert consisted of an awesome performance of Charles Ives' Piano Sonata No. 2, the "Concord" Sonata, by Stephen Drury. The work is an unquestioned landmark in contemporary music, and is mammoth both in length and in conception. The four movements, or rather, intellectual portraits of Emerson, Hawthorne, the Alcotts, and Thoreau, are linked only by two brief themes, which are often interwoven into unrecognizable form. While the latter half of the sonata is more tonal and thus more accessible, the work presents an extreme challenge both to the listener and the performer.

Drury, an extremely talented senior with a penchant for contemporary music, interpreted the piece with an utterly compelling, almost demonic intensity. His virtuosity and technical facility excelled in explicating every facet of the sonata, from the darting melodic leaps in Hawthorne to the Alcott's hymnal simplicity. Even the liberties he took in tempi and dynamics sounded authentic and convincing. Ives himself said of the Hawthorne, "It is not intended that the metrical relations...be held too literally." Louis Cooper was also excellent in his performance of the flute solo which unexpectedly concludes the final portrait of Thoreau.

The philosophy of the Harvard Group for New Music seems clear: if you can get to hear good performances of contemporary music, you'll get to like some of it, or at least learn what you don't like about it. After all, even Saturday night's unenthusiastic performer admitted after the concert. "Once you get used to it, a good piece really isn't bad at all."