Music: Composer with Punch

Marius Constant is a fast-rising 33-year-old Parisian composer with a peculiar aural defect: he can never listen to a single instrument without mentally hearing all the instruments of the orchestra. This gets so bad, he complains, that "even when I play the piano all by myself, I hear strings and trombones, trumpets and percussion.'' Not long ago Composer Constant also found himself hearing tom-toms, marimbas, vibraphone and celesta. He committed these exotic cerebral sounds to paper, and last week a Parisian audience jammed into the Theatre des Champs-Elysées to hear the results, interpreted by Guest Conductor Leonard Bernstein and the French...

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