The Year's Best

Recognition has been a long time in coming to Negro Composer Howard Swanson, 42. Swanson knew at the age of nine that he wanted to be a musician, but he was 21 before he was able to begin well-rounded training. Working nights in a post office to support his family, he managed to put himself through the Cleveland Institute of Music. He won a fellowship to study composition in Paris. When the Germans took over, he fled to Spain, then returned to the U.S. and a routine job with the Bureau of Internal Revenue. He went on composing in his fourth-floor Harlem walk-up at night.

He wrote some songs, and one of them, sung by Marian Anderson, finally got his name on a Carnegie Hall program. Among his other compositions he wrote two symphonies, and last season one of them brought him further recognition. Dimitri Mitropoulos, a conductor always on the lookout for new works for the New York Philharmonic-Symphony, studied the score of Swanson's Short Symphony (his second), gave it a first performance in Carnegie Hall, and later included it in his Edinburgh Festival program. It was rich in melody and vigorous in rhythm, pleasing if not musically adventurous.

Last week Howard Swanson got another boost. The New York Music Critics Circle judged Short Symphony (twelve minutes) the best new orchestral work heard in Manhattan last season.

Other winners: Bohuslav Martinu's Comedy on the Bridge (best new opera), Benjamin Britten's Spring Symphony (best choral work), William Schuman's Judith (best dance score), Gian-Carlo Menotti's TV opera Amahl and the Night Visitors (a special citation to Menotti and NBC).

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