Composers' Lab Concert

Less than sixty people turned out to hear the music of six Harvard composers at Paine Hall Monday night. This scant response was not, on the whole, warranted.

Ten piano pieces, Thoughts without Words, by Thomas Beveridge, were first on the program. They are short effusions, with such captions as "Patience," "Foolishness," and "Philosophy." The music is considerable foolishness and very little philosophy.

The Two Rilke Songs, by Frederic Rzewski, which followed, are written in a twelve-tone idiom of particular expressivity. They are for soprano with piano accompaniment, and are based upon two poems from the Book of Hours. Rzewski's music, although not easily accessible, is definitely to be reckoned with. In the first song particularly, there were moments of real beauty.

Christian Wolff's music is not easily accessible either. It is a decidedly esoteric product of the John Cage cult, although probably better than anything Cage has done. Mr. Wolff played four pieces for piano and one for prepared piano. The technique is pointillist; tones are widely dispersed over the keyboard range, and in their succession they seldom suggest melody in the traditional sense of the term--single tones and sonorities assume a significance in themselves, and the phrase or line is replaced by the aggregate of points. Whether the feeling of oppression from lack of variety which comes after hearing this music for five minutes would be dispelled by a knowledge of its structural subtleties is a crucial question, for upon its answer lies the life or death of this difficult style.

The Four Short Duets for Viola and Cello, by Stephen Addiss, have little in the way of structural subtlety. They do not give the impression of careful construction or particular refinement. Here and there a nice hummable tune or warm sonority occurs--but that is all.

The five songs of John Perkins, using texts from Robert Herrick and the translations of Ezra Pound, are noteworthy for their formal finish. The music uses various, rather derivative, idioms, suggesting now French Impressionism, now late-German Romanticism; but this mobility is used to good advantage in catching the shifting moods of the texts.

A Duo for Oboe and English Horn, by Robert Moevs of the music faculty, concluded the program. This work is sensitively constructed, with regard to the over-all form, but the thematic materials employed and the developing processes to which they are subjected do not create very exciting listening. There is not much melodic variety, and when resort is made to the dramatic device of gradually rising chromatically through successive transpositions of virtually the same material, one is reminded of the "Sturm und Drang" school.

Although not all of the six persons represented in Monday's program proved themselves creators to be taken seriously, the experience was certainly profitable. The original function of the Composers' Laboratory, as providing a testing ground for the fledgling, was fully realized, and from this point of view the concert was a success.