After a half-century of anarchy, music by young Americans seems to be settling down to an era of less revolution and greater creativity. Student composers no longer insist on cacophony just to sound up-to-date, nor do they shudder at anything resembling melody.
Three Pieces for string quartet by John Bavicchi exemplify music in this state of transition. They contain measures of unrelated, ugly chords; plunks and scrapes that communicate little; and involved counterpoint that moves convulsively yet musically gets nowhere. Such passages appear to be willful "modernizing," a stubborn and out-dated refusal to compromises between method and expression. But Bavicchi does create some powerful climaxes. The second piece is touchingly lyrical, recalling the best of his songs. Here the treatment is still dissonant, but it is dissonance that grows logically from the melodic line, and our sensibilities have long ceased to rebel at that.
More conservative and immediately accessible are John Austin's Four Modal Canons. Scored for two violins and viola, they follow the old principle of the "round": one viola leads off and the others enter later playing exactly the same notes. The limitations are obvious; all variety must proceed from harmonies produced by the passage of voices and from little imitative figures as each enters. Austin's first canon produces lovely sonorities and a mood of serenity that help sustain its length. In the second, however, parts too closely spaced give the effect of tedious repetition. Although the others are better constructed, their novelty of form wears uncomfortably thin.
Russell Woollen's Flute Quartet was the only work to suffer in performance. While playing correctly enough, the instrumentalists--particularly the flutist--did little to give the quartet the dynamic treatment it needs to hold together. Father Woollen's individual musical ideas are melodious and carefully scored, but their arrangement is episodic. His phrases, moreover, have a structural symmetry that eventually becomes monotonous.
In sponsoring the Harvard Composers' series, WHRB, the Music Club, and Adams House have given more than mere lip-service to local talent. They have provided an opportunity for these composers to crystallize, through the test of performance, the course which their music will take in the future.
