Music: Pittsburgh Renaissance

Modern music has two basic problems: 1) it doesn't get heard, and 2) it gets heard.

—John Erskine

In Pittsburgh last week, modern music was heard, loud and clear. The occasion: the city's first International Contemporary Music Festival. For a total of 15 hours, the rafters of two concert halls rang with the peculiarly bright and gloomy, slick and perverse sounds of modernist music. At times, the cacophonies seemed to be competing with the harsh melody of Pittsburgh's blast furnaces. Most of it was tried and (often) true music that has been played for the past 25 years, but on some of the scores the ink was hardly dry. Among the musical nuggets:

¶Bartok's Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, its famous strains sometimes soaring, sometimes buzzing like bumblebees in a sewer pipe.

¶Atonalist Anton von Webern's whispering, taut vignettes, Five Movements for String Quartet.

¶Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms, its Gregorian-style chorus and skirling reeds sounding massive and almost pagan.

¶Alban Berg's warmhearted Violin Concerto, expertly played by Szymon Goldberg and the Pittsburgh Symphony.

¶Roy Harris' wartime Symphony No. 5, which gave a vigorous and homely effect.

The most popular program was performed by eleven separate choruses (totaling some 700 young singers), who followed each other on & off the Carnegie Music Hall stage with military precision, and sang eleven brief world premieres. Hardest-working musician at the festival was Conductor William Steinberg, who spent as many as twelve hours a day rehearsing and leading three orchestral programs. Visiting performers included the Juilliard, New Music and Walden String Quartets, singers Leslie Chabay and Nell Rankin and the U.S. Military Academy Band. Across the footlights were critics from as far away as California and England.

Pittsburgh has had its Carnegie International art exhibits for a half century but, until last January, its musical life was little more than its fine orchestra and a list of visiting artists. Then the Allegheny Conference on Community Affairs, which had pushed programs to clear the city's smoke-blackened air and give its oppressive architecture a face lifting, set up a committee to see what it could do about the city's musical soul.

About the same time, Composer Harris, the festival's executive director, touched Pittsburgh's modern Medici (the A.W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust, Howard Heinz Endowment, Edgar J. Kaufmann Charitable Trust) for most of the estimated $50,000 cost, got a 62-man international jury to select the world's most important composers.

To bring the city closer to its festival, top brass in labor, education and religion got busy and sent out 60 separate choruses to give free downtown concerts as advance publicity. Pittsburgh's Mayor David L. Lawrence was pleased: "This is all part of the city's continuing renaissance."