Music of Our Time

they shall have music

BY HERBERT KUPFERBERG

Carl Ruggles, American composer who reached his ninetieth birthday last March 11, had to wait a long time for recognition, not to mention recording, of his major work. The symphonic poem called Sun-Treader was written more than thirty years ago and first performed in Paris in 1932. It had a few other hearings at European gatherings devoted to contemporary music, and then silence set in. Now, suddenly, Sun-Treader has been rediscovered. Last January Bowdoin College in Maine decided to honor Ruggles at a festival at which several of his not very numerous compositions were presented. The climax was a performance of Sun-Treader — which, incredibly, had never before been heard in the United States — by the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Jean Martinon in the Portland City Hall Auditorium. Almost simultaneously, a SunTreader recording was issued by Columbia, though not, unfortunately, by the Boston Symphony. All this while Ruggles, alert, active, and cantankerous, was at his home in Arlington, Vermont, fuming because his doctor wouldn’t let him make the two-hundred-mile trip to Portland to hear the work played.

In his craggy, independent personality — a personality vividly reflected in his ruggedly dissonant music — Ruggles is a New Englander to the core. He was born in Marion, Massachusetts, where Cape Cod begins to jut out from the shore, studied at Harvard, and has lived much of his life in Vermont. But there also have been stays, as a conductor and a teacher, in Minnesota and Florida, and productive years in the twenties and thirties in New York, where he helped found and guide the International Composers’ Guild. He was a boon companion of composers like Charles Ives and Edgard Varèse, and he also was closely associated with painters. Rockwell Kent used him as the model for Captain Ahab in his Moby Dick illustrations, and Thomas Hart Benton made a famous painting of him playing the piano with tremendous hands. Ruggles himself began painting thirty-five years ago (several of his works have entered important American collections), and he is still at it.

As a composer, Ruggles can be said to have been ahead of his time much in the way that his friend Charles Ives was. His work lacks the exuberance and breadth of Ives’s; it is more abstract and less pictorial. Not for Ruggles the New England patriotic parades, church services, and village green celebrations. His compact, compressed music, strongly atonal and dissonant, gives a feeling of tremendous power seething within a tightly knit structure. Like Ives, Ruggles is a master of modern counterpoint, writing intricately complex scores.

Sun-Treader certainly is a case in point. It is a tone poem for large orchestra in one movement, seventeen and a half minutes long, which takes its title and its spirit from Robert Browning’s first published poem, “Pauline,” a paean to Percy Bysshe Shelley. At the head of the score stands the quotation, “Suntreader, life and light be thine forever!” Neither Browning nor Shelley might have felt at ease with Ruggles’ fierce and unrelenting dissonances, but there is an affirmative and ecstatic quality in this powercharged score. Sun-Treader opens with an almost startling reminiscence of Brahms’s First Symphony, with a kettledrum slogging its way through a thick texture of orchestral sound. Soon, however, Ruggles leaves Brahms, and the rest of the nineteenth century, far behind, with his intertwining lines surging and ebbing until an almost unbearable concentration of musical energy has been built up. Sun-Treader is an intense and complicated piece — Ruggles had to use enormous notepaper to write down its overlapping and interlocking canons — and it requires a meticulously prepared and precisely executed performance to make it “sound.”

Not all of the requirements seem to have been fully met in Columbia’s recording of Sun-Treader, which is coupled with a more recent and less imposing American work, Robert Helps’s Symphony No. 1 (MS-6801, stereo; ML-6201, monaural). The recording was made under the auspices of the W. W. Naumburg Foundation, which annually selects American music for recording. The performers are identified on the label as the Columbia Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Zoltan Rozsnyai. The Columbia Symphony Orchestra in this case really is the Vienna Symphony Orchestra; in other words, this completely unfamiliar and enormously complex American score was turned over to a foreign orchestra for recording, presumably with minimal time for preparation and rehearsal. However compelling the economic reasons for this procedure, the artistic results are less than perfect, for Sun-Treader emerges with some of its details obscured and its contrasts unmarked.

Nevertheless, this strong-fibered score has at last been recorded, and in a way that makes its originality and importance quite evident. It needs now concert performances, to familiarize both performers and audience with its difficulties and its rewards. The music of Charles Ives seems slowly to be making its way into American musical life, though well after his death; perhaps there is still hope for Carl Ruggles, still waiting at the age of ninety.

Sometimes composers who exist apart from the musical mainstream or who otherwise have trouble winning a broad public have the good fortune to find a champion among contemporary conductors. Such was the case with Frederick Delius, the English expatriate composer, whose music was played by Sir Thomas Beecham and others until it at last won a permanent, if rather narrow, niche in the orchestral repertory. Delius has been dead for more than thirty years, but his works keep on turning up on concert programs, and make a respectable showing in the record catalogues.

The latest entry is an Angel release which includes the Concerto for Violoncello; A Song Before Sunrise, a brief bit of nature painting for small orchestra; and Songs of Farewell, a setting of five excerpts from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. The performers are Jacqueline du Pré, cellist, and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and Choral Society, conducted by Sir Malcolm Sargent. The recording was made under the auspices of the Delius Trust (Angel S-36285, stereo; 36285, monaural).

Delius was one of the supreme colorists in music, but he evokes pictures rather than paints them; his music is most often quiet and understated, and there is no denying that it puts some people to sleep. The cello concerto, written in 1921, is a rather uneventful but beautifully lyric work; it flows on without a break for nearly twenty-five minutes, spinning out long serene phrases for orchestra and for cello. It makes a fine piece to set off the talents of Jacqueline du Pré, a twenty-year-old cellist who, judging by her sleek tone and musical sensitivity, would seem to have quite a career before her.

Delius’ Songs of Farewell is a considerably more commanding piece of music, demonstrating his ability to infuse his lyricism with a rhythmic and dramatic pulse. While Whitman’s “barbaric yawp” has certainly been subdued and softened, Delius in his characteristically uninsistent way does capture some of the surge and sweep of the verses. This is especially true in the second section, “I stand as on some mighty eagle’s beak,” where the harmonies are strangely suggestive of “the wild unrest” which Whitman put into words.

That Songs of Farewell came to be written at all is something of a miracle; Delius, living at his home in Grez-sur-Loing, France, had become blind and paralyzed, and dictated the work, bar by bar, to Eric Fenby, a British composer who came to assist him in 1928. Songs of Farewell is Delius’ last choral composition, and the Royal Philharmonic musicians and singers pour all their conviction and fervor into it.

Even more of a musical oddity than Delius was a French composer named Charles Koechlin, who, along with Pierre Boulez and Olivier Messiaen, is represented on a remarkable new Angel record devoted to French modern music (S-36295, stereo; 36295, monaural). Koechlin (18671950) was a composer who never even bothered to get his works published, being content with a busy life as a pedagogue, theoretician, writer, and critic. Yet he composed a prodigious number of works, virtually all of them still in manuscript, and one of these has at last been recorded by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Antal Dorati.

It is, of all things, a symphonic poem based upon Kipling’s Jungle Book and entitled Les Bandar-log. In 1939 Koechlin wrote an extended seven-part work entitled Le Livre de la Jungle; the Bandar-log section he subtitled Scherzo des singes. As all who have read Kipling’s story “Kaa’s Hunting” know, Bandar-log is the name given to the tribe of jungle monkeys, lying, empty-headed mischief-doers who “howl and shriek senseless songs” and who are “always pecking at new things.”

However literally Koechlin may or may not have taken Kipling’s characterizations, he certainly seized the opportunity for some gloriously atonal monkeyshines in his piece. His apes jabber in twelve-tone music; they also try to construct a Bachian fugue on the old French song “J’ai du bon tabac,” But Koechlin also manages to give his score a serious turn by writing some reasonably lyrical atonal music, and by turning the specious fugue into the genuine article. Sometimes the line between satire and seriousness isn’t clearly drawn, but Les Bandar-log is a score that follows a recognizable story line, that makes musical sense, and that is generally fun to hear.

Pierre Boulez’s Le Soleil des Eaux, also included on the record, consists of two movements for singers and orchestra based on poems about the River Sorgue by René Char. The jagged and jarring melodic lines of Boulez’s settings certainly spell out an advanced musical idiom, but they add little to Char’s poems, which have a clear lyricism of their own.

The longest piece on the record is Olivier Messiaen’s Chronochromie, written in 1960 and one of his most imposing creations to date. Messiaen points out that Chronochromie is derived from the Greek words for time and color, and he suggests The Color of Time as a translation. Titles aside, the music represents a striking attempt to reproduce the sounds and rhythms of birds. Since many of these are expressed through such instruments as the xylophone, the glockenspiel, the harp, the marimba, and the cymbal, Chronochromie becomes an agglomeration of bell songs as well as bird songs. It progresses by means of chords, patterns, and rhythms rather than through melodic development, and even if it gets nowhere in particular, it makes some spectacular sounds along the way. Perhaps that is all one is entitled to ask nowadays.

Record Reviews

Berlioz: Requiem

Eugene Ormandy conducting Philadelphia Orchestra, with Temple University Choirs and Cesare Valletti, tenor; Columbia M2S-730 (stereo) and M2L-330 With all its recent advances, stereophonic sound is not yet the equal of the Berlioz Requiem, with its battery of sixteen timpani, its 250 choristers, and above all, its four auxiliary brass bands stationed at the corners of the compass. But the massed sounds of the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Temple University Choirs come as close as anything on records to capturing the grandeur of this dramatic and rather unchurchlike depiction of the Last Judgment. As an organizer of orchestral sonorities Ormandy has no peer, and he certainly has the sounds (and the orchestra) to work with here. So the Berlioz Requiem, a strange and even terrifying work, achieves much of its effect in this recording. What it lacks is a first-rate choir. Until we can produce in this country choruses that match in quality our great symphony orchestras, we are likely to continue turning out unequal recordings of choral masterpieces such as this.

De Falla: El Amor Brujo and ThreeCornered Hat ballet suites

Lorin Maazel conducting Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, with Grace Bumbry, mezzo-soprano; Deutsche Grammophon 139115 (stereo) and 39115 It is astonishing how precise this recorded performance can be in execution, and how flawless in sound, and yet how it can miss completely the spirit of the music. That spirit, of course, is Spanish; but this record is strictly De Falla auf Deutsch, with still another adulteration provided by Miss Bumbry’s American accent in the vocal solos. Intelligent conductor, excellent singer, able orchestra — wrong repertory.

Schoenberg: Gurre-Fieder

Rafael Kubelik conducting Bavarian Radio Orchestra and Chorus, with Herbert Schachtschneider, tenor; Inge Borkh, soprano; Hertha Töpper, alto; Kieth Engen, bass; and others; Deutsche Grammophon 138984/85 (stereo) and 18984/85: two records

Whether it is symptomatic of the death throes of romanticism or the birth pangs of modernism, Schoenberg’s Gurre-Lieder holds a unique place in the music of the twentieth century (it is barely of the twentieth century at that, having been virtually completed in 1901, although its first performance came only in 1913). It is a piece massive in length, philosophy, and orchestration, being derived from a monumental Danish poem about a legendary king and his legendary love, and scored for a vast orchestra including seven clarinets, ten horns, and eleven percussion instruments. Musically it seems to blend elements of Wagner, Richard Strauss, and Mahler into a compound with its own distinctive characteristics. Oddly enough, bigness is not among these; despite its tremendous array of performers, the Gurre-Lieder never seems overblown or bombastic. This is the third complete recording ever made of the Gurre-Lieder, the first being a Stokowski set, in 1932, the second a 1953 Haydn Society album conducted by René Leibowitz in Paris. Both of the older sets had virtues, but the new Deutsche Grammophon release, excellently recorded at a live performance, supersedes them both if only because of its superior sound.

Goldsmith: She Stoops to Conquer

With Alastair Sim, Claire Bloom, Brenda de Banzie, Alan Howard, and others, directed by Howard Sackler; Caedmen TRS-309-S (stereo) and TRS309: three records

Dr. Johnson said of Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer that he knew of no comedy which had “so much exhilarated an audience.” and his verdict will meet no argument here. In this sparkling recording, She Stoops to Conquer is a flavorsome farce indeed, especially in those scenes in which a young man mistakes an elegant private home for an inn, with uproarious complications. Alastair Sim gives a ripe portrayal of old Mr. Hardcastle, the bewildered host, who confesses: “I love everything that’s old: old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wine; and . . . I have been pretty fond of an old wife.” This album demonstrates that old plays, too, stand up pretty well.

Leadbelly: Keep Your Hands Off Her

Huddie Leadbettor, folk singer; VerveFolkways FVS-9021 {stereo) and FV-9021

Records by the late great Leadbelly have for years been a staple of any substantial folk-song collection. But this reissue is an unusually good one, with fresh, undistorted sound, and an excellent selection of material, from the rhythmic working chant of “Lining Track” to the religious ecstasy of “We Shall Walk Through the Valley.” Nor will connoisseurs overlook the straightforward sexual possessiveness of the title song: “Keep your hands off her/ You hear what I say?/ You know she don’t belong to you.” Other songs that induce an immediate replay are “There’s a Man Going Around Taking Names” and “Fiddler’s Dram.” All in all, this is a collection which tells why Leadbelly is counted among America’s greatest natural folk singers.

Sweet Charity

Gwen Verdon, John McMartin, Thelma Oliver, James Luisi, and others; Columbia KOS-2900 (stereo) and KOL-6500 Never underestimate the power of Gwen Verdon. In this album, from the current Broadway show with music by Cy Coleman and lyrics by Dorothy Fields, she turns on the charm so brazenly that she almost convinces the listener he is actually in touch with a dumb dance-hall hostess with a heart of gold. And the general atmosphere of the seamy but really lovable Big Town is carried out in ensemble numbers such as “Big Spender,” sung by the girls of the Fan-Dango Ballroom, where Miss Verdon works, and “The Rhythm of Iife,” sung by a bevy of beatniks in a Greenwich Village church, which she merely visits. It is only after a while that one realizes that most of the music in Sweet Charity is fairly second-rate stuff and all that excitement is caused by the technical craft and resourcefulness of those involved, rather than by any genuine originality. But Miss Verdon makes it fun to be fooled.

A Treasury of Andre Maurois

Read and spoken by M. Maurois; Spoken Arts SA-911 and SA-912 (monaural): two records, available singly Now in his eighties, André Maurois looks back in these records over his long and productive career. Speaking in French, he reminisces about his early days, recalls his association with such writers as Proust, Gide, and Kipling, and reads from his works, beginning with the World War I Les Silences du Colonel Bramble. Maurois has always been a kind of cultural ambassador from French civilization to our own, and these records offer eloquent and deeply personal testimony to his contribution. They also offer some unexpectedly delightful surprises, such as his recital of his own free adaptation into French of Kipling’s poem “If.” He gives it such an admirable and elegant turn of language that one almost wishes his version could be translated back into English!