American Premieres

Contemporary American music sometimes sounds as if it were written on an electronic computer: the arithmetic adds up, but every sum sounds the same. Last week U.S. audiences were introduced to the recent works of five U.S. composers whose figuring, however it comes out, is at least distinctive. The five and their formulas:

Henry Cowell, 63, turned up in Kansas City for the premiere of his 22-minute Concerto for Percussion and Orchestra. Using 64 percussion instruments, the concerto featured five percussion "soloists," whose duties proved so complex that they had to dart about the stage. Among the instruments employed: Chinese gongs, temple blocks, tom-toms, marimbas, vibraphones, Pyrex mixing bowls, a xylophone, a celesta, a glockenspiel. For all its fearsome instrumentation, the concerto proved to be one of Cowell's more immediately appealing works -- alternately delicate and boisterous, crosshatched with curiously shifting rhythms. Less stark than the works of Cowell's youth (when he liked to roll the piano keys with his fore arms to achieve "tone clusters"), the concerto was also less melodic than the works of what Cowell thinks of as his middle period. "No composer worth his salt these days would be without a third period," says Composer Cowell. "This is mine."

Gunther Schuller, 35, stepped into the pit at Manhattan's City Center to conduct the premiere of his Modern Jazz: Variants, a score for a George Balanchine ballet. Onstage were the white-tied-and-tailed members of the Modern Jazz Quartet and around them, in predominantly green and purple practice clothes, moved the members of the New York City Ballet company, including Soloists Diana Adams, Melissa Hayden, John Jones, Arthur Mitchell. The dancing for the most part was sinuous and tentative, borrowing some of its movements from the Lindy Hop, but on the whole avoiding the Lindy's frenzied exuberance. Schuller's score was the essence of the "cool"-spare, fragmentary, resembling jazz only in its rhythmic drive. Like some of Schuller's other recent work, it represented an attempt to weld jazz and classical music in what he himself refers to as Third Stream Music. Unfortunately, the stream never seemed to be flowing anywhere.

Samuel Barber, 50, saw his Die Natali: Choral Preludes for Christmas given its first New York performance by the New York Philharmonic. The remarkably successful piece is essentially a patchwork of familiar Christmas carols artfully embedded in unfamiliar harmonies--0 Come, O Come, Emmanuel, We Three Kings of Orient Are, Silent Night, God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen. The mood for the most part is reflective, the tone intensely lyrical, as most of Barber's best music is. The only truly shocking section of the piece is also one of the most effective: the brasses suddenly explode into a jazzy, freewheeling theme that hardened Yuletiders will eventually recognize as Good King Wenceslas.

Easley Blackwood, 27, canceled his classes at the University of Chicago, where he teaches theory and composition, to attend the premiere of his Second Symphony by the Cleveland Orchestra. Allied to no compositional school, Blackwood has impressed critics in the past by his gift for ringing original changes on traditional forms, and by what one critic calls "the courage not to write the last word." The Second Symphony sounded echoes of Shostakovich, Bartok, Hindemith, and even Wagner, but in sum spoke a sardonic, dissonant language all its own. For listeners who like their music mellower, Blackwood had a cautionary word: "I hope they will not misconstrue this symphony as an angry composition.''

Chou Wen-chung, 37, born in Chefoo, China, but now a U.S. citizen, heard the New York Philharmonic in the first New York performance of his "And the Fallen Petals," a Triolet for Orchestra. An attempt to achieve in sound "the emotional qualities of Chinese landscape painting," Petals proved to be a disturbing, atmospheric work full of stabbing percussive effects, shrill, flinty string and brass lines, occasional suggestions of the waveringly hypnotic melodies of the Orient. Composer Chou, who spent much of his youth fleeing the invading Japanese, was thinking, he says, of "the second World War, my war, and of all the young lost in violence and terror, who, dying, looked back through a veil of blood at the incomprehensible landscape of their lives." His title he took from a poem by Meng Hao-jan (689-740 A.D.):

All through the night Such noise of wind and rain And the fallen petals Who knows how many!

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