Several of the nation's major symphony orchestras last week filled the air with novel sounds.
The New York Philharmonic-Symphony, conducted by Dimitri Mitropoulos, played the first performance of Roy Harris' Symphonic Epigram. Composer Harris wrote his six minutes of music to commemorate the orchestra's 25th season of CBS broadcasts, used the letters CBS as his motive (he jimmied the letter S into the scale by using its phonetic spelling, Es, which, in German, also means the note E flat). The music was brassy, somber and overwritten, and seemed to be just getting under way when it stopped.
The Boston Symphony, conducted by Charles...