Music: Atom Overture

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Arthur Roberts of the University of Rochester is a man with two abiding interests: nuclear physics and music. While studying for his M.A. at Columbia in the '30s, he also found time to get a diploma at Manhattan School of Music. Even while working in the radiation laboratory at M.I.T. during the war, he managed to write a piano sonata, a quartet, two worthy operettas and some good-humored songs, including one called The Cyclotronist's Nightmare.

Last week Physicist Roberts' newest composition, An Overture for the Dedication of a Nuclear Reactor, got a fitting first performance—by the 69-piece Oak Ridge (Tenn.) Symphony Orchestra (30 atomic scientists, 16 wives, some sons & daughters).

In the Oak Ridge High School Auditorium, lanky (6 ft. 4 in.) Dr. Roberts, 39, heard Conductor Waldo Cohn, a biochemist, explain the new piece to one of the few audiences in the world who could understand the composer's complex program notes.

The first of the overture's four sections, according to Dr. Roberts, features four motives: the tones of AEC, and then the harmonic intervals 6-C-12 (formula: sixth element on the periodic table, carbon, atomic weight 12); then 92-235 (92nd element, uranium), and 94-239 (94th element, plutonium). In the third section, "quite a lot happens when the pile goes critical: the 92-239 theme goes through some well-known transmutations. This is accompanied by the increasingly rapid operation of a BF-3 theme (boron tri-fluoride) in the woodwinds, and is terminated by a 'scram' for which I found it expedient to use cadmium (C-D)."

When Dr. Cohn finally launched the orchestra into the eleven-minute piece, it was not as awesome and confusing as Composer Roberts' description. Most found it pleasantly melodious and rhythmically interesting, particularly in the long, Bolero-like section called "Initial Operation." Dr. Alvin M. Weinberg, director of research at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, thought it "captured the spirit of a reactor operation." Said another physicist: "Listening to it, you could see the pile growing."

Oak Ridge's local music critic found some of it "rather repetitious. But then, so is a chain reaction."