"In This Age of Dodecaphonics"

Leonard Bernstein is a man of so many parts that he finds it hard to find time for the part that is serious composer. He had not composed a work since the Kaddish symphony two years ago. But he could not say no when the Bishop of Chichester asked him to create a piece for the 1965 Tri-Choir Festival to be held at the ancient cathedral in Sussex, England. Last week a capacity audience of the excited and curious packed into New York's Philharmonic Hall to hear the Chichester Psalms.

Psalms, like its predecessor, is a choral work in Hebrew and is scored for a prodigious cavalcade of instruments including a glockenspiel, xylophone, a pair of cymbals, a suspended cymbal, tambourine, triangle, rasps, whip, wood block, three temple blocks, timpani, snare drum, bass drum and three bongo drums. Conductor-Composer Bernstein made the most of them; he went through his entire ballet routine on the podium and had the Philharmonic Orchestra playing like gods, and the Camerata Singers sounding like angels.

Hot-Gospeling Psalm. The work opened with the first two verses of Psalm 108: "Urah, hanevel, v'chinor! A-irah shachar! [Awake, psaltery and harp! I will rouse the dawn!]" on a crisp accented chord in 6/4 time. A swelling chorus that any director would snap up for a Biblical movie epic passed into a hot-gospeling rendition of Psalm 100 ("Make a joyful noise unto the Lord"). Psalm 23 ("The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want") was a pastoral solo sung by a boy alto till the chorus interrupted with "Why do the nations rage, and the people imagine a vain thing?" The third and finest section of Bernstein's 18 1/2-minute work interweaves Psalm 131 through a simple canon to a pianissimo "Amen."

An applauding audience of Bernstein fans loved it. The critics were less enthusiastic, but respectful. "Extremely direct and simple--and very beautiful," said the New York Times. But to some sophisticated ears, it was only a skillfully composed travesty of religious sentimentality that plucked the heart strings but left the spirit untouched. Explained Bernstein, "I feel that it is my simplest and most direct composition. It's very difficult to write tonal music in this age of dodecaphonics, and I'm stuck with being a tonal composer."

Possibly Rolled. The performance was actually a premiere, since the work will not be played at Chichester itself until later this month. Let the bishop be on guard: he will need to assemble a highly capable cathedral choir. Aside from the challenge of the score, there is the problem of pronunciation (for non-Hebrew speakers) as posed in Bernstein's notes: "H--slightly guttural, though not so guttural as ch, which is pronounced as in German (Buch). R--rolled if possible, as in Italian."

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