Music: Pioneer from Georgia

Gerald Wilfring Gore is a prolific arranger of music who for years made a modest living turning out choral adaptations of such varied works as Home on the Range, Pestalozza's Ciribiribin, William Byrd's Ave Verum Corpus. Last week, in Manhattan's Caspary Auditorium, a crowd of musical professionals gathered to honor Arranger Gore on his 75th birthday. But the man who rose to take a shy bow at concert's end was known to the audience not as Gerald Gore but as Composer Wallingford Riegger.

Although the compositions of Wally Riegger are widely and justly admired, particularly by fellow composers, the man who created them has always had to make a living doing something else. Gerald Gore is only one of nine pseudonyms under which Riegger has written about 400 arrangements at $40 apiece. Most of them, he testifies, "were claptrap; they were well done, but none of them caused any thrills." Nevertheless, they "turned an honest penny" for Gore-Riegger; along with teaching, they enabled him to devote the rest of his time to the compositions that, far from claptrap, are among the most distinguished of his generation.

Twitters from a Satellite. The bulk of Composer Riegger's work is atonal—in fact, he was an atonalist back in the days before the tone row had replaced the velvet neckcloth as a musical status symbol. But in contrast to the cool, desiccated manner of European twelve-tone composers of the Schoenberg-Webern school, Riegger turned out propulsive, ruggedly rhythmic compositions full of jangling dissonances and roughhewn contrasts. The effect was sometimes as startling as an impressionist-styled canvas executed with a house painter's brush.

Last week's concert displayed the early Riegger in Blue Voyage (1926), a shimmering, almost Debussyan mood piece; the later Riegger in Variations for Violins and Violas (1957), a series of brief, busy, crotchetily rhythmic episodes that exploded in the ear as strangely as a satellite's call; and finally the less flamboyant, middle-ground Riegger in the serene, elegant textures of Canon on a Ground Bass by Henry Purcell (1951). Not included was the work for which Riegger is perhaps best known—his Third Symphony (1947), which won the New York Music Critics' Circle Award in the season of its première. In that fine work Riegger is at his abrasive best, putting night-wailing strings against the muscularly marching brasses in an effect that is taut, menacing and powerfully moving.