Aging Modernists

Homeward from Salzburg last week after an anniversary festival trekked the Young Turks of 20th century music.They carried the sobering knowledge that many of them were not young any longer--indeed, not even "Turks" any more.

Their first Salzburg gathering 30 years ago was a different story. They were ardent young musical modernists in those days, and they founded an organization for mutual support: the International Society for Contemporary Music. The charter promised that the I.S.C.M. would "protect and encourage especially those [musical] tendencies that are experimental and difficult to approach." In plain language, the society would fight to get its members' music performed.

Uphill Fight. I.S.C.M. did that, and more. In its annual festivals, it helped spread the news (and the international reputations) of such men as Twelve-Ton-ists Arnold Schoenberg, Anton von Webern and Alban Berg, France's Darius Milbaud and Olivier Messiaen, Italy's Luigi Dallapiccola, the U.S.'s Roger Sessions and Aaron Copland.

It had been an uphill fight, the old-timers reminded themselves nostalgically, but nowadays modern music is almost commonplace in such countries as France, Germany, Italy, Britain and the U.S. Was there really any need for I.S.C.M. any more? Pierre Capdevielle, music chief of Radiodiffusion Franc,aise, was handed the presidency. He politely declined. So far as he was concerned, Capdevielle implied, I.S.C.M. could shut up shop.

Reasonably enough, it was the younger members, many of them from small countries, who spoke up to save I.S.C.M. They had trouble getting their work performed at home, and wanted the same kind of "protection and encouragement" that the older generation had had. The delegates of Australia, Chile, Israel, New Zealand, The Netherlands, Norway, South Africa, Sweden and the U.S. withdrew to a cafe and held a caucus. Their proposal, which the society later accepted: a five-man executive board to keep the I.S.C.M. going for another year. The average age of the new board members was 31--20 years younger than that of last year's officers.

Genius Wanted. If the younger modernists had trouble getting performances at home, they got them at Salzburg. The festival was planned to include at least one composition from each nation in good standing, so that delegates heard representative new music from each nation, if not always the best music newly written. Critics felt the difference, deplored the festival's lack of a "genius," but pronounced Frenchman Jean Martinon's String Quartet, Op. 43 first-rate, Englishman Humphrey Searle's Poem for 22 Strings pretty good. Festival shocker: Le Soleil des Eaux, a surrealistic, twelve-tone composition for soprano, tenor, bass and orchestra by the current bad boy of French music, Pierre Boulez, 27. It puzzled even the radicals. One of the more conservative was reminded of the story of the man who took his first bath: "I can't say that I liked it, but I think it's something everybody ought to go through."

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