Music: Sounding a Joyous Jubilee

What was it like to be in Vienna during the heyday of Haydn, Beethoven and Schubert? Music lovers today can only wonder enviously, but within a single week recently Americans had the extraordinary opportunity to discover new works by three of their country's leading masters. In New York City with the Israel Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, 68, unveiled his high-spirited Jubilee Games. In Miami, Elliott Carter, 77, heard the Composers Quartet chart his latest passage through twelve-tone thickets in his String Quartet No. 4. And in Philadelphia, there was the premiere of Queenie Pie, a little-known "street opera" by Duke Ellington. Rarely has the breadth, diversity and achievement of American composers been in such abundant evidence during so short a period of time.

Jubilee Games was written for the 50th anniversary of the Israel Philharmonic (the orchestra predates the founding of its country). A two- movement piece, it is a kind of numerological Hebraic rhapsody. In the first movement, "Free-Style Events," the orchestral players improvise lustily on a seven-note scale while shouting out seven times sheva, the Hebrew word for the mystical number seven, then proclaiming "Hamishim!," which means 50. Brass instruments evoke the blowing of the shofar, the ram's horn used in sacred services; strings scuttle along skittishly; even a synthesizer chimes in.

The second movement, "Diaspora Dances," is more conventional but no less eclectic. Letters of the Hebrew alphabet are given numerical values, which serve as the music's metrical underpinning. The exotic sounds of ancient Palestine mingle with the plaintive songs of the shtetl and the joyous urgency of jazz, encompassing in quick sketches Jewish music through the ages. Only Bernstein would try something like this, and only he could get away with it. Emotionally undisciplined, Jubilee Games is no masterpiece, but it is fresh and powerful, and one of Bernstein's most honest pieces in years.

Honesty is a trait that has long marked Carter's music. So have obscurity, density and a resolute unwillingness to compromise. As one of the leading (and one of the last) exponents of academic serialism, a postwar compositional style marked by rigid mathematical organization of pitch and rhythm, Carter tends to be honored more in words than with performances. But his String Quartet No. 2 and No. 3 won Pulitzer Prizes in 1960 and 1973, and a hard core of enthusiasts rapturously greets each new work. The Second Quartet treated each instrument as an individual; the Third paired them. In the Fourth Quartet, Carter finally has reunited two violins, viola and cello. In four movements that flow together seamlessly, the piece bristles with ferocious rhythmic difficulty: a five-note figure in the viola may be pitted against a nine-note phrase in the second violin. It takes nimble fingers to play this music and nimbler ears to follow it.