June 16 witnessed a concert of choral and instrumental music by New England composers. Lorna Cooke deVaron led her carefully trained New England Conservatory Chorus in pieces dating from 1612 to the present. The unpredictable Charles Ives was represented by his strangely polytonal "Sixty - seventh Psalm;" Randall Thompson '20, Rosen Profesor of Music, by "Alleluia," his best piece; Irving Fine '37, by "Have You Seen the White Lily Grow?"; Carl McKinley '17, by a portion of his dramatic legend The Kid, which incorporated American cowboy song material and is scored for piano and percussion; and Mabel Daniels by her rousing "Psalm of Praise" with piano, three trumpets and timpani, composed last year for the 75th anniversary of Radcliffe. Several of the composers were present to comment on their music.

After a brilliantly witty commentary, Walter Piston '24, Namburg Professor of Music, conducted his own immaculate "Divertimento for Nine Instruments." Robert Brink was the fine soloist in the first local performance of the revised version of Alan Hovhaness' Concerto No.2 for Violin and String Orchestra, a rather bland neo-modal work. Carl Ruggles' extremely dissonant Angels was written for either string or brass ensemble; the performance here by strings could not equal the extraordinary effect that three trumpets and five trombones can achieve. The concert ended with Daniel Pinkham '44 conducting the combined chorus and orchestra in his new Wedding Cantata. In five movements, this is a wholly ingratiating and captivating work, full of imaginative and nuanced timbres--his finest composing to date.

Ballet Company

Two performances of a program by Jose Limon and the 13 other members of his dance company were offered. With choreography by Doris Humphrey, "Variations and Conclusion From New Dance" proved visually striking with contrasting blue and orange costumes. Wallingford Riegger's music was neurotic and neomodal, and a bit static harmonically. "Ritmo Jondo," based on songs and dances of Spanish gypsies, suffered only from ragged strings in the orchestra.

Lucas Hoving and Lavina Nielsen danced their own "Satyros," a hilarious spoof devised for a frothy Poulenc trio for piano, bassoon and oboe (the latter exquisitely played by Robert Freeman '57). The piece de resistance was Limon's own "Emperor Jones," a 20-minute ballet based on the O'Neill play. The choreography is inspired and Pauline Lawrence's costumes superb. The prolific Heitor Villa-Lobos composed the magnificently frenetic score. This ballet concert marked a tremendous improvement over the one presented last year.

"Devil's Disciple"

The choice of a play this year fell on Bernard Shaw's "The Devil's Disciple," which had four performances. It is not the best Shaw, but it is the only full-length play he wrote about America and the first of his works to be staged in this country. The play begins as a romantic melodrama, but suddenly turns into a witty farce of lese-majeste in the last act.

David Pressman's direction was adequate, though he let some of the cast pace their lines too slowly; and there were other signs of insufficient rehearsal time. E. G. Marshall, as the Rev. Anderson, gave us another example of his skill in a character-type role. Felicia Montealegre, as his wife, did her captivating best with an absurdly implausible role. Kevin McCarthy was exuberantly athletic and flery in the leading role of the brash and blasphemous wayward son Dick Dudgeon. Martyn Green relished his brief appearance in act three as the sly General Burgoyne; and Muriel Berkson, Edward Finnegan and John Heldabrand provided excellent support. The outdoor theatre had one great advantage: when Dick was about to be hanged (see cut above), the Reverend was able to come charging to the rescue on horseback!

e.e. cummings

This year's Festival Poetry Award went to e.e. cummings '15. Mr. cummings gave a reading of a dozen and a half of his poems on June 23, including a new poem on the occasion of the Festival, "i am a little church," more traditional in style than many of his leg-pulling, nonsensical concatenations of letters

He was introduced by last year's Award-winner, Archibald MacLeish, Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, who said that we should not worry too much about the meaning of cummings' poems, that "a poem is apprehended in the ear." He termed cummings "one of the few pure lyric voices of our time." It is true that cummings reads very musically and slowly, relishing every syllable whether it means anything or not. The best impression was made by his poem "Thanksgiving: 1956," in which he denounced the official apathy of our government during the Hungarian crisis. Still, cummings is far from being in a class with MacLeish as a poet; and I can think of several more worthy Award recipients.

History of Jazz

Last Thursday a crowd of over 16,000 turned out to hear "A Living History of Jazz," with John McLellan as narrator and the Herb Pomeroy jazz band as illustrator. McLellan's commentary had plenty of meat but was not too technical for the layman. He gave a splendid survey of the origin of jazz, its evolution into a craft and finally an art-form.

Every point was illustrated by one or more of the 16 Negro and white musicians in the Pomeroy band--all of them skilled enough so that they not only play in their own personal style but were able to imitate with uncanny authenticity all the different styles and idiosyncrasies of the other great players of the past and present.

Some of the topics covered by McLellan were: the "blues," that aped the human voice; the rococo-like ragtime; the tension-relaxation principle of "swing," wonderfully illustrated by a piece called "Nobody Will Room With Me"; the small "spasm" or "skifflle" bands of home-made instruments; the staccato phrasing and polish of Bix Beiderbecke; Paul Whiteman, who "tried to make a lady out of jazz and wound up with a eunuch"; the wider tone colors and neo-jungle rhythms of Duke Ellington; the two-beat music of Jimmy Lunsford; Benny Goodman and the importance of his Fletcher Henderson arrangements; the blues-based simplicity of Count Basie; the thin, sparse sax playing of Les Young; the small jam sessions during World War II made necessary by the wholesale draft; the emergence of bebop and the "soul" of Charlie Parker; the wild, Afro-Cubanism of Dizzy Gillespie; the "cool jazz" of Miles Davis; the influence of Woody Herman and Stan Getz; the recent "West Coast jazz," with its use of flutes and oboes, its emphasis on counterpoint and on writing out all the notes instead of on improvisation; the Jerry Mulligan quartet; and today's "big band jazz." I must single out sax-player Jaki Byard, who wrote many of the fine illustrations. This was a most rewarding evening.