New Works: A Social Allegory

Some conductors will do anything to get an audience. Last week at a regular concert of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Maestro Zubin Mehta showed motion pictures. Now, it is well known that in Hollywood country, people will come out to see anything on film. And it is equally well known that when it comes to introducing new music, Mehta is a genuine 20th century fox. But wasn't this carrying show biz a bit too far?

Not at all. Mehta was just following the score of Contextures, a new multimedia orchestral work which he commissioned from Composer William Kraft. Accompanying the first movement of Contextures, subtitled "Riots—Decade 60," was a color film in which abstract patterns had been scratched, brushed and drawn on celluloid, and punctuated with black and white stills of last summer's riots in U.S. cities. Accompanying the nonstop fourth and fifth movements was an exacting film inspection of Painter Reginald Pollack's works on the themes of segregation and violence—closeups of hooded Klan marauders, straining limbs, the curled bodies of innocent victims. "It's a social allegory," says Composer Kraft, "and as I was working on it last summer, the 6 o'clock news kept intruding. It has a lot to say."

Belligerence & Fun. The obvious intent was to involve the audience, much as Happenings and psychedelic rock try to do. Still, most of what Kraft had to say was musical. His style projected a cool blend of rich dissonance and easygoing lyricism, and though Contextures seemed to owe almost as much to Broadway and jazz as to Stravinsky, there was never any doubt who the Kraftsman was.

If not inherently a far-out composer, Kraft, 44, obviously is not afraid to be bold theatrically. The huge rear screen, on which the films were projected, was not the only innovation. At the end of the first movement, Kraft provided a brief interlude of jazz in which a solo violinist and snare drummer were picked out by spotlights in the darkened hall. Then at the end, he bid the audience a cheerful adieu with the rippling tinkle of an offstage jazz quartet.

Since Kraft also happens to be Mehta's principal tympanist, it was not surprising that he made extra use of such percussion esoterica as roto-toms (a set of small tuned drums), muted gongs, anvils and Chinese wind chimes. What was unusual and effective, however, was the relaxed, jazzy undercoating that showed that even an age of turmoil and anxiety can have fun. But Contextures mainly had to do with fierce tensions and dissonances in which various sections of the orchestra played frenetically against each other. "I suppose this is a belligerent work," says Kraft. "But that's where the social comment comes in: we're all different, but somehow we function together."