Giving New Composers a Hearing

Groups like Speculum Musicae perform contemporary works

When Haydn wanted to hear his latest work, he needed only to stroll over to the Esterháazy court orchestra, put the score on the stands and wait a while. Before long, the musicians would give the piece a vigorous tryout. What is more, as a servant of an 18th century prince, Haydn was expected to provide new compositions with regularity. Modern composers no longer have to wear livery, or write on demand, but neither are they assured of having their music performed. Soloists are often indifferent or even hostile; orchestras and opera companies rely mostly on time-tested classics to please their patrons.

In response, the peculiarly 20th century phenomenon of the new-music ensemble has sprung up. Such groups consist of virtuoso players who come together for one purpose: to give contemporary music a hearing. One of the best-known is Speculum Musicae (mirror of music), celebrating its tenth anniversary this year with a series of three concerts at Manhattan's Symphony Space.

"No other group has done so much of my music so well," says Composer Elliott Carter. "Often contemporary music is shown to its worst advantage, like an art exhibit that is displayed without lighting. The works tend to be done indifferently and not very persuasively."

On last week's program a commissioned work, Ausencias, by Venezuelan Alvaro Cordero-Saldivia, was forgettable. It is a busy, dense-textured work that seeks to combine elements of Afro-American music with academic compositional procedures—what the composer calls "a gradual unfolding of two musics that have a totally contrasting profile." Yet the whole proved less than the sum of its parts.

Far more expressive was John Harbison's Samuel Chapter (1978), for soprano and small ensemble. Composer Harbison presents an episode from the Old Testament's First Book of Samuel in a deliberately archaic way, lending his work an austere, ceremonial quality that suits the text well.

An arrangement for piano trio of Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht, made in 1932 by Eduard Steuermann, emphasized in its piano writing Schoenberg's debt to Brahms. The piece is mainly a curiosity, for the piano can hardly compensate in either weight of tone or sustaining power for the missing quartet of strings. Jon Deak's Sinister Tremors (1977), for clarinet, percussion and tape, is more theatrical than Speculum's customary fare; at one point, a table containing pie tins, boards, broken glass and other objects is knocked over, simulating an avalanche.

This frankly humorous melodrama about a terminally unlucky Klondike gold rusher has one foot in the music hall, the other in the concert hall. It was booed almost as lustily as it was applauded.