Zarathustra

WHILE MOST OF YOU were perishing in the diabolical black fire of this neo-Dadaist life in America, agonizing over Harvard's impending football doom like a particle in the livid-frigid Flux, I decided to drop in on the Cecilia Society and the Glee Club concerts at the still point of the burning world. "Song is the key," I reasoned, "for only the rapture of song links such disparate spirits as Arjuna, Chemosh, Mailer, Nixon, Tristan, Bruckner, and the confluence of latent universal souls thrashing about in the torpid light of Art. Let us ublimate the manifold contradictions of life in an decipherable moment of ineffable unity. And so, rowing Endgame on top of Presidential Power, and ling the ineluctable pull of some Taoist-Maoist dooms against my Captain Shotover-Thomist faith, I ded for Sanders to hear the Stravinsky Mass, and oral works by Britten and Dello Joio in honor of the atron saint of music.

Holding my program like a chalice, I silently recited the catechism of all music reviewers: music reviewing is the art of conjuring penetrating irrelevancies with intractable grace. The severely controlled lyricism and hieratic sonorities of the Stravinsky Mass brought me to reflect on the decline of Western monisms into a congeries of mercanto-ecclesiastical hoaxes. This work could well be the last great Mass ever written. The Society's performance possessed a certain Antarctic charm completely devoid of devotional feeling, but was plunged into obliquy by mispronunciation in the Kyrie (Keer-eiyeh) and the sinusoidal vibrato of the soprano and alto soloists in the Gloria. The choir plodded through the long Credo with sacerdotal vindictiveness but decided to clear up its wooly tone for the exquisite Sanctus. It was on the whole a bloodless performance of an intensely religious work.

THE OTHER TWO WORKS. Britten's Hymn to St. Cecilia, and Dello Joio's To St. Cecilia, were surpassingly unremarkable. The only marginally interesting section of the Britten piece, which uses a problemmatical Auden text, was a Queen Mab Scherzo passage affording relief from the "flickering flames" of "Blonde Aphrodite." The unidentified soprano soloist thrilled us with another seismic performance whose beauty might be compared to an autumnal wheat field methodically bending to the breeze. Mr. Dello Joio, whose star has been rising ever since his epochal Air Power brought home the Caligulan glory of the air force to the musically thirsty, seems to have made little musical progress since that Curtis Lemay extravaganza. His To St. Cecilia was an exciting grotesque written in his consummately banal idiom featuring vapid stentorian outbursts for a brass ensemble and Victory at Sea-type arching melodies for the hapless chorus. This clangorous work, sounding like Hollywood with the rough edges knocked of, brilliantly captured a certain Pliestoceme ambience which would have been beyond the grasp of a lesser composer. The character of the performance was captured in the Dryden line "What passion cannot Music raise of quell," the answer to which was of course "None at all."

STILL SEEKING that ineffable moment. I attended the risorgimiento of the Harvard Glee Club in the annual Harvard-Yale concert. The Yale group began with a thin version of Palestrina's Supplicationes for main chorus and responsive small choir (which joined me in the Tibetan heights of the upper balcony) and proceeded to good performances of Holst's delightful Blacksmith Song and Dowland's beautiful Come Again, Sweet Love. Their part closed with a stupendously tedious arrangement by Fenno Heath of Donne's Death Be Not Proud. The Harvard Glee Club performed a less interesting program except for a mildly "modern" work by Thomas Beveridge. The Harvard group had a darker sound than Yale, better dynamic control, weaker top tenors, better phrasing, and better comic relief in the form of an accompanist who agonizingly wrenched childishly simple parts from his ill-starred piano. A final comparison is impossible since I shamelessly left before the inevitable spirituals and football songs.

My miasmal depression was finally sundered a day later, however, by the last minute eruption of our team to tie Yale's Macedonian offense, at which point the Harvard Band found the key and played its Zarathustra cheer with overpowering apostrophic radiance.

Holding my program like a chalice, I silently recited the catechism of all music reviewers: music reviewing is the art of conjuring penetrating irrelevancies with intractable grace. The severely controlled lyricism and hieratic sonorities of the Stravinsky Mass brought me to reflect on the decline of Western monisms into a congeries of mercanto-ecclesiastical hoaxes. This work could well be the last great Mass ever written. The Society's performance possessed a certain Antarctic charm completely devoid of devotional feeling, but was plunged into obliquy by mispronunciation in the Kyrie (Keer-eiyeh) and the sinusoidal vibrato of the soprano and alto soloists in the Gloria. The choir plodded through the long Credo with sacerdotal vindictiveness but decided to clear up its wooly tone for the exquisite Sanctus. It was on the whole a bloodless performance of an intensely religious work.

THE OTHER TWO WORKS. Britten's Hymn to St. Cecilia, and Dello Joio's To St. Cecilia, were surpassingly unremarkable. The only marginally interesting section of the Britten piece, which uses a problemmatical Auden text, was a Queen Mab Scherzo passage affording relief from the "flickering flames" of "Blonde Aphrodite." The unidentified soprano soloist thrilled us with another seismic performance whose beauty might be compared to an autumnal wheat field methodically bending to the breeze. Mr. Dello Joio, whose star has been rising ever since his epochal Air Power brought home the Caligulan glory of the air force to the musically thirsty, seems to have made little musical progress since that Curtis Lemay extravaganza. His To St. Cecilia was an exciting grotesque written in his consummately banal idiom featuring vapid stentorian outbursts for a brass ensemble and Victory at Sea-type arching melodies for the hapless chorus. This clangorous work, sounding like Hollywood with the rough edges knocked of, brilliantly captured a certain Pliestoceme ambience which would have been beyond the grasp of a lesser composer. The character of the performance was captured in the Dryden line "What passion cannot Music raise of quell," the answer to which was of course "None at all."

STILL SEEKING that ineffable moment. I attended the risorgimiento of the Harvard Glee Club in the annual Harvard-Yale concert. The Yale group began with a thin version of Palestrina's Supplicationes for main chorus and responsive small choir (which joined me in the Tibetan heights of the upper balcony) and proceeded to good performances of Holst's delightful Blacksmith Song and Dowland's beautiful Come Again, Sweet Love. Their part closed with a stupendously tedious arrangement by Fenno Heath of Donne's Death Be Not Proud. The Harvard Glee Club performed a less interesting program except for a mildly "modern" work by Thomas Beveridge. The Harvard group had a darker sound than Yale, better dynamic control, weaker top tenors, better phrasing, and better comic relief in the form of an accompanist who agonizingly wrenched childishly simple parts from his ill-starred piano. A final comparison is impossible since I shamelessly left before the inevitable spirituals and football songs.

My miasmal depression was finally sundered a day later, however, by the last minute eruption of our team to tie Yale's Macedonian offense, at which point the Harvard Band found the key and played its Zarathustra cheer with overpowering apostrophic radiance.