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Easley Blackwood, 27, canceled his classes at the University of Chicago, where he teaches theory and composition, to attend the première of his Second Symphony by the Cleveland Orchestra. Allied to no compositional school, Blackwood has impressed critics in the past by his gift for ringing original changes on traditional forms, and by what one critic calls "the courage not to write the last word." The Second Symphony sounded echoes of Shostakovich, Bartok, Hindemith, and even Wagner, but in sum spoke a sardonic, dissonant language all its own. For listeners who like their music mellower, Blackwood had a cautionary word: "I hope they will not misconstrue this symphony as an angry composition.''
Chou Wen-chung, 37, born in Chefoo, China, but now a U.S. citizen, heard the New York Philharmonic in the first New York performance of his "And the Fallen Petals," a Triolet for Orchestra. An attempt to achieve in sound "the emotional qualities of Chinese landscape painting," Petals proved to be a disturbing, atmospheric work full of stabbing percussive effects, shrill, flinty string and brass lines, occasional suggestions of the waveringly hypnotic melodies of the Orient. Composer Chou, who spent much of his youth fleeing the invading Japanese, was thinking, he says, of "the second World War, my war, and of all the young lost in violence and terror, who, dying, looked back through a veil of blood at the incomprehensible landscape of their lives." His title he took from a poem by Meng Hao-jan (689-740 A.D.):
All through the night Such noise of wind and rain And the fallen petals Who knows how many!