Yale-Harvard Glee Clubs

Choral concerts pall easily; a varied program trying to parade through the last five centuries of choral music almost always ends up plodding. It is especially difficult for a concert to offer a fused experience and not just deal out snippets of feeling.

The Yale-Harvard Glee Club Concert, despite some perplexing problems succeeded in a very enjoyable fashion. Instead of moving in the drab chronological way of so many concerts, the program, for instance, had the quiet counterpoint of Nanino lead to an erruptive Milhaud psalm setting. Both choruses performed their older serious works well, but they combined to render an only mildly exciting Part II Finale from Berlioz' Faust

One enjoyed the contrasts: Harvard's tone balloons out round and warm, and projects best, as in the Welsh folk songs arranged by Davison--dense, pondering textures. But Yale thrusts out its lines with thinner but sharper tone, singing Leisring's O Fillii et Feliae with great verve.

But if football songs and Buxtehude were quite tasteful together, triteness and conventionality did worm in elsewhere. It is hard to understand how Villa-Lobos could have written a song with such dreadful, simple-minded rhythm as The Little Train; nor is it easy to see why Yale sang it, and a worthless Swiss yodel song as well. And to top it off, they sang Fenno Heath's settings of three Blake poems, which employ only the most common place harmonies and rhythms and convey little of the poems' meanings. Indeed, several of the Whiffenpoofs' own songs were more imaginative. Heath's arrangements of two American folksongs were better, but his programming does not exploit the quality of his chorus.

What seemed most troubling all evening was the sameness of it all. Any melody had a hard time expressing a specific feeling of its own; rather it would drift into a nostalgic sitting-round-the-fire sort of mood which could be poignant but little else. This sentimental cliche seemed to deaden the vivacious choruses from The Beggar's Opera, and seemed to some degree to underlay almost all the folksongs. Davison's arrangement did avoid it by its striking chords and elaborate voicing, and Fukunata's Barcarolle of Koshiki Isle escaped it through a swift melodic dive repeated throughout.

Simple choral arrangements led to triteness: in Sanchez Malaya's Pues Bien Yo Necesito, a movingly bitter solo jarred badly with a sleepy, hummed background. The same happened in The Beggar's Opera songs when several jaunty soloists livened up the bland arrangement of an essentially impersonal chorus. Hearing a full chorus all evening robs music of its feeling because the tone colors and textures are so limited. Too many, groups sound like the imaginative Wiffenpoofs. Glee clubs must use smaller ensembles if they are to be more expressive.

An even deeper reason for the overuse of the full chorus comes from the nostalgic role of music in America today. The escape we Americans seek so much in music emerged that evening to stifle subtlety; the music aroused some warm and mellow sentiments, and that was all.

This difficulty in finding a range of expression grows all the more because modern music finds the chorus little suited to its techniques and styles. The glee club is denied a vital place in the emerging music of its own day--and it must therefore fight to make that of the past more than nostalgia.