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The Charles Ives Center: A Session of Song

Gregg Smith Singers cxplorc ncw American scores

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Richard and Joannę Moryl, Otto Luening. Gregg Smith

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^T^he big news in New Milford, JL Connecticut, this summer was not that Henry Kissinger rented the old Fredric March place, much less that New York magazine pronounced the lown the hub of “country chic," but that the Charles Ive$ Center lor American Musie held its second session there from August 10 to 15.

CICAM, which got under wav in New Milford in August 1980, has already managed to establish a good deal of continuity under the joint di-rection of Richard and Joannę Moryl, a composer and performer respec-tively |sce musical america December 1980]. The sessions are held on the campus of Canterbury School. Thev enable selected U.S. composers to hear their works re-hearsed and performed in public— string quartets last year, musie for voice this summer—and to hear “establishment" works as wcll. Whereas in 1980 the string players were largely unknown, the performers this August were the Gregg Smith Singers, per-haps the leading chorał group in America today. The number of par-ticipating composers inereased this year from eightecn to twenty-nine, which mav have been too manv.

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They were of high competence. how-cver and sińce Gregg Smith had madę the selection (last year it was done by committee) there seemed little doubt that the musie would “sound.”

This assumption proved incor-rect in a couple of cases. Sonie a cap-pella serial writing presented such dif-ficulties that there was time to

Frank XI er kling, editor of ()pera News from 1957 to 1974, now Iwes in New Milford and is musie/arls crilic of the

Danburv News-Times.

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V * prepate only part of the musie. Oth-erwise the new works ran a predict-able, negotiable gamut from the neo-romantic to the simphstic, with Debussy hovering overhead as patron saint where the summer before it had been Bartok. At a pair of formal eve-ning concerts the Gregg Smith Singers performed American vocal musie that might be called classical (Charles Ives, Irving Fine, Samuel Barber, Otto I.uening, William Schuman, Ned Rorem. Luening łnmcself was or. hand for the first concert to speak brief]y about Ives. as Fdliott Carter had done in 1980.

A social consciousness

Vlcast three of the composers rep-resented during the daytime happened to be Luening pupils. Two others were returnees from last summer. the venerable Arthur Stern and the protean Ann Silsbee, who doubled on short notice for an absent accompanist and showed herself to be the only composer present with a social consciousness. The work in which Mrs. Silsbee did this was Dona nohis fmcern. an anti-nuke chorał statement

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that rosę from sonie gropings into an outery and then subsided to aleatoric mutterings and shouted [>lace-names, dying out with a whisper if not a w hi m per.

The rangę of sounds exploited licie was unique for the session. (Lar-liei Mrs. Silsbee had treated her fel-low comp>osers to Leauings, a work about autumn 10 her own text which called for solo soprano chirpings, pre-pared piano, and partly lilled winę glasses that the singer stroked with a violin bow.)

Elsę where much of the musie sounded academic. There were var-ied settings of e.e. cummings, Y eats. Shelley, and the Cavalier poets with umformly busy piano |>arts. There were contemporary approximations of Palestrina, lyrical and tone-cen-tered, as well as exercises in which the tex» seemed used as a clothesline for Haunting bright ingenuities of sound— clusters, quarter-tones, glis-sandi, humming. There was cven a latter-day Handel named Darrell and a latter-day Gershwin named W.L. Buelow. One American, Corey

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