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...favorite refuge of a critic confronted with a new piece of modern music is to plead that it demands a second hearing. Last week Conductor Leonard Bernstein obliged. He led the New York Philharmonic through a performance of Lukas Foss's Time Cycle for Soprano and Orchestra, an atonal work based on poems by Auden, Housman, Kafka and Nietzsche, all of them having to do with the flow of time, clocks or bells. With Adele Addison expertly taking the vocal part, the work proved to be one of Foss's strongest-a mosaiclike structure full of wispily haunting...
Pivotal Notes. Foss began to construct a system built around a series of pre-agreed pivotal notes and a system of letters that indicated what roles the various instruments were to assume at differ ent times. Now he has abandoned the idea of pivotal notes, but the group still starts with "a certain musical vision," worked out in countless rehearsals and set down in graphs and Foss's own specially devised symbols. "If we hit something good," says Foss, "we try to remember it. If something bad, we try to forget it." The technique, insist the players...
...Foss and his group of composer-performers, known as the Improvisation Chamber Ensemble, appeared at Carnegie Hall last week with the visiting Philadelphia Orchestra to display their technique in somewhat elaborated form. Their scheduled piece, certainly the oddest they have yet attempted, was titled Concerto for Improvising Solo Instruments and Orchestra. Pianist Foss and his men-flute, cello, clarinet and percussion-were ranged downstage in front of the orchestra, and Conductor Eugene Ormandy only rarely cast a nervous backward glance at them...
Controlled Chance. The Concerto consisted of three movements, actually written down for the orchestra by different members of the ensemble and "edited" by Foss. The music was rather faceless-tricked out with a full Modern Composer's Kit of dissonances, rhythmic angularities, splashy climaxes. Against this background, Foss and the ensemble worked out their improvisations. It was in the Intermezzo, when the orchestra was silent, that Foss's technique of "controlled chance" came into fullest play. The Foss ensemble was free to improvise -and it did, with some highly interesting results. The instruments traded themes, stitched their...
Innovator Foss, who is back teaching at U.C.L.A. after a year's sabbatical for composition, does not expect his system to replace the written score. He himself has just completed a fully written-out composition, Time Cycle, for Soprano and Orchestra (to texts by Auden, Housman, Kafka and Nietzsche), which will be played for the first time by the New York Philharmonic this week. Between numbers, Foss's ensemble will do improvised "commentaries" on the songs. With the spread of controlled improvisation, Foss thinks the day may come when a typical concert will begin with bits of Bartok...