Word: concert
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...HARVARD GROUP FOR NEW MUSIC is a crusader for the performance and reception of contemporary music. The group's concert last Saturday night, which included works by Burton, Dautricourt, MacMillan, and Ives, showed that the battle is by no means won; even one of the evening's performers half-jokingly confided, "I'll be amazed if you like this; I know I don't." But at least he, like an increasing number of Harvard community members, was interested enough to take a first step toward modern music. And despite his words, the concert proved both commendable in the level...
...Harvard Group for New Music, now in its second season, was set up by music graduate students Lou Karchin and Paul Salerni for a dual purpose. First, they wanted to provide a forum for music written by composition students at Harvard, although each concert program also includes one masterpiece of contemporary music. Second, they were interested in getting Cambridge audiences past the "This stuff doesn't even sound like music" stage...
Recognizing this need for repeated exposure to a complex piece of contemporary music, Karchin and Salerni programmed the same work to open both halves of the concert: David Burton's Serenata for 8 Wind Instruments, composed in 1971. Burton was a graduate student in music before his untimely death last year, and the Serenata shows a keen appreciation of the possibilities inherent in wind chamber music. In particular, winds rather than strings, by the nature of their instruments, are more suited to Burton's use of short, rhythmically changing yet repeated motives. If anything, the Serenata is too rhythmically demanding...
...bulk of the second half of the concert consisted of an awesome performance of Charles Ives' Piano Sonata No. 2, the "Concord" Sonata, by Stephen Drury. The work is an unquestioned landmark in contemporary music, and is mammoth both in length and in conception. The four movements, or rather, intellectual portraits of Emerson, Hawthorne, the Alcotts, and Thoreau, are linked only by two brief themes, which are often interwoven into unrecognizable form. While the latter half of the sonata is more tonal and thus more accessible, the work presents an extreme challenge both to the listener and the performer...
...Harvard Group for New Music seems clear: if you can get to hear good performances of contemporary music, you'll get to like some of it, or at least learn what you don't like about it. After all, even Saturday night's unenthusiastic performer admitted after the concert. "Once you get used to it, a good piece really...