Music Lukas Foss

I COULD say many things about Lukas Foss, but none of them would be to the point. I could talk about his compositions, or his conducting, or the day he locked himself out of Sanders and some friends of mine and I had to let him in through the basement, but nothing would reach the heart of the matter. Foss will be teaching at Harvard next year, and maybe a year from now I'll understand him. It's hard to say.

Lukas Foss is a musical radical, whose basic concept of what a piece of music is differs totally from the classical idea. It is hard, almost impossible, for me to comment on a man whose fundamental understanding of music is completely unlike what has always been called music, but it may be possible to reach some conclusions about Foss.

The performance which Foss gave Monday night was one of great virtuosity; it was a well-rehearsed, tightly-run concert. The first work, Webern's Five Pieces for Cello and Piano. performed by Foss and cellist Tsuyoshi Tsutsumi, went well, for all of its three minute duration. It was played with a kind of tense crispness which made every note transparent, and was the most understandable piece on the program.

After the Webern, Foss performed his Echoi for four instruments, assisted by Tsutsumi, percussionist Jan Williams, and clarinetist Edward Yadzinski. The title of the work tells its story. Echoi is Greek for "echoes," and, as Foss explains in his notes to the recorded version of the work, is also a name for some ancient Arabian modes. The piece is in four parts, somewhat loosely-structured, and is partly aleatory-at a random signal from the percussionist, the performers jump back to an earlier section of the work and replay it, in order to destroy whatever structure may have been created. I can have no quarrel with the performance-it seemed all right to me, but the work itself seems open to question. Aleatory music-music based on chance-is well-established, but is it legitimate music?

Echoi does establish a structure, but tears it down again as I have mentioned, almost as if there were something immoral about well-ordered music. While the piece itself might be very pleasing as an example of the new music, the composer goes out of his way to make it displeasing. The senseless, random posturing of the percussionist as he goes about the stage, beating on a steel pipe, and on the piano's strings and sounding board, as well as anything else which comes to hand, make the listener take the work less than seriously, and obscures its spontaneous musical value.

The final work on the program was Terry Riley's In C. It consists of fifty-three musical figures played by any number of instruments in random configuration while a pianist repeatedly and rapidly plays eight notes on high C and C'". By Foss's definition, it is not a piece of music, but "Like a sky with clouds. You look up, and think you see everything, but then you look up a few minutes later and everything is changed." The piece has a kind of hypnotic fascination; still I would tend to agree with Foss that it is not a piece of music. It is quite a pleasant thing to listen to, in the way that some Muzak is not unpleasant, but it is hardly inspired.

Lest I seem to be an aging reactionary, let me assure you that I have no hatred for the new music. I suspect that the trouble is not in the music, but in the composer. Writing in the New York Times recently, Aaron Copland observed that too many contemporary composers use the university as their base, and consequently, the music they produce is refined and scholarly, yet almost unfit for human consumption, except for those who believe that music should be seen and not heard. Coplan cites Foss, with his long connection with UCLA, and now Harvard, as one of these composers.

I SUSPECT that he is far too correct. The university has a way of offering an artist room and board in exchange for the sale of his soul, and corrupting his product with its ivory tower approach. In C and Echoi are fine musical exercises. As works for performance, however, they don't measure up.