Cackles & Groans

Perhaps the most harassed of U.S. musical institutions, the League of Composers celebrated its 20th birthday last week with a concert in Manhattan's Town Hall. No crowd clamored to buy standing room. But to many musicians it was an important event. For 20 years the league had been almost the only hand to uphold the frequently flickering torch of contemporary high-brow music.

At the close of World War I, Europe's great musical culture suddenly began to express itself in what to many sounded like groans and cackles. Only a few oldsters such as Jean Sibelius, Richard Strauss and Sergei Rachmaninoff, clung to the traditional sonorities. In Vienna dour Composer Arnold Schoenberg led a whole school of younger men in what sounded to conventional ears like some weird insult. In Paris, Igor Stravinsky, Arthur Honegger and a group of Left-Bank revolutionists began imitating African tom-toms and hopefully setting restaurant menus to music. U.S. composers in the main followed the Europeans. Scarcely a tune was written by highbrows that anybody could whistle. Between them and the concertgoing public a gulf opened.

Into the gulf stepped Manhattan's League of Composers, which included both U.S. and European musicians. Firmly convinced that modern music, pleasant or unpleasant, should be heard by the public, the league gave whole concerts of world premieres, published a magazine called Modern Music, propagandized among conductors and opera houses. The league's audiences sometimes hissed; music critics usually snorted. But not all of the league's musical bombshells were duds. It introduced U.S. listeners to the phenomenal Russian talents of Serge Prokofieff and Dmitri Shostakovich. It gave the U.S. ballet premiere of Igor Stravinsky's brilliant Le Sacre du Printemps.

In the '30s the league began to strike political as well as artistic snags. Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini had agreed on their hatred of modern music. As World War II approached, many of the league's European members wavered between exile and totalitarianism. Spain's famed Manuel de Falla (The Three-Cornered Hat) signed with Dictator Franco. Parisian Composers Arthur Honegger and Florent Schmitt toured Germany as honored guests of the Third Reich. Italian Modernist G. Francesco Malipiero began writing Fascist anthems for Mussolini. Unable to cope with political wanderings, in 1939 the embarrassed league restricted its composer membership to U.S. citizens.

For last week's birthday concert, six surviving leaguers had written special compositions. They were performed by such topflight artists as Soprano Marjorie Lawrence and the Budapest Quartet. The small audience politely applauded the work of Boston-born Walter Piston (Quintet for Flute and Strings), Brooklyn-born Aaron Copland (Birthday Piece, On Cuban Themes For Two Pianos), French-born Darius Milhaud (string quartet), California-born Frederick Jacobi (songs about the prophet Nehemiah), Czech-born Bohuslav Martinu (Trio for Flute, Violin and Piano). Hit of the evening came at the program's close with Russian-born Louis Gruenberg's Variations on a Popular Theme. It nearly brought discreet cheers. Composer Gruenberg's theme was The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze. In it the audience had finally discovered a tune it could whistle.

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