Forum for Moderns

New Jersey-born Violinist Max Polikoff has a theory about modern composers: "Death doesn't enhance them, only possibly their music." To enhance the composer while he is still alive is Violinist Polikoffs avocation. Last week, in Manhattan's 92nd Street Y.M.H.A., Polikoff gave the sixth concert in his annual "Music in Our Time" series, one of the nation's most remarkable sounding boards for contemporary compositions.

The program was provocative: four works by four U.S. composers, three of whom are little known. Bennington College's Louis Calabro was represented by the premiere of his Sonata for Piano; Brooklyn College's Josef Alexander offered his Songs for Eve; Hall Overton, composition teacher, presented his String Quartet. To round it off and set a frame of reference, Princeton's well-known Composer Roger Sessions was there with his Sonata for Violin.

On with the Questions. Predictably, Sessions' piece was the most substantial --a difficult "and blazing work, brilliantly played by Violinist Polikoff himself. By contrast, Alexander's Songs for Eve was a plodding and undramatic vocal presentation of texts by Archibald MacLeish around which four accompanying instruments (violin, cello, English horn, harp) weave contrasting sonorities in a striking instrumental texture. Calabro's Sonata and Overton's Quartet were both professional jobs, but more interesting in their smoothly machined parts than in their bland conclusions.

The concert was not over at the curtain. A key to Director Polikoff s program is a postconcert forum in which the audience is invited to fire questions at the composers. In preceding concerts, audiences have pulled no punches: "What does it mean?" "Why doesn't it have any melody?" "Do you have to make it sound so complicated?" From the blunt questions, Polikoff hopes everybody learns something. Last week's haymaker: "With whom are you trying to communicate?" Replied fiercely complex Composer Sessions: "With anyone who will listen. All the composer asks is a willing ear."

Stop with Debussy. Violinist Polikoff, who has made a reputation for himself on radio, TV and in recording studios, started the series in 1956, now gives eight concerts a year at $8 for the full subscription. With occasional foundation windfalls he just about breaks even--not counting the endless, unpaid hours spent screening new scores and rehearsing. Nowadays he finds that it is easier to sell modern music to lay audiences than to musicians: "Most musicians stop with Debussy; that's the last 'new' music they learned to play."

Although he has presented the works of more than 130 contemporary composers, at 52 Polikoff still remains awed by the composer's function. In 1950, he recalls, he played Charles Ives's Sonata No. 11n Carnegie Hall and called Ives's home to check a detail. While talking to Mrs. Ives, he heard the ailing composer shouting in the background: "I want to shake that young man's hand!" Marvels Polikoff: "Think of it! He wanted to shake my hand because I was playing one of his pieces!"

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