Was it the Tik-Tok Man of Oz? Was it a windup Leonard Bernstein? Whatever it was, a machine conducted the New York Philharmonic last week in a performance of John Cage's Atlas Elipticalis with Winter Music (Electronic Version). And considering what it was conducting, it probably did every bit as well as any human conductor could.
Cage's mechanical maestro had a diamond-shaped head perched on a 6-ft. pedestal, with a single arm rigged to make one complete revolution in eight minutes, the duration of the piece. It was the crowning gimmick of what had once seemed like an intriguing idea: a Philharmonic avant-garde festival.
Whops & Skeletons. The opening program, last month, was a shocker; lulled by Beethoven's Second Symphony, the audience was suddenly jolted by the whapping of wood blocks and the toneless horn-blowing of Yannis Xenakis' Pithoprakta. The Greek composer's work was so radical that this first U.S. performance sounded something like skeletons dancing in a wind tunnel. The audience found Bernstein's comments condescending. "A lot of mathematical formulas which I cannot follow," he said of the composition.
In a later program, Stefan Wolpe's First Symphony was equally iconoclastic and prefaced by an even airier speech. Wolpe had written it in 1956, had never been able to get an orchestra to tackle what Bernstein called this "unperform-able work." Finally, after Stefan Bauer-Mengelberg—a mathematician as well as a conductor—agreed to take the podium, it went into rehearsal. It was still too much for the Philharmonic, which attempted only the first two movements (Not Too Slow and Charged). The symphony rapidly disintegrated into fragments of non-melody and non-rhythm. Long passages sounded like a busy Saturday morning at a conservatory practice hall, with all the studio doors open. The final result was a kind of carefully organized chaos.
Ragtime & Skooby-Ooby-Doo. One of the evenings came alive to the sound of jazz, of a sort. Aaron Copland (63) performed his 37-year-old Piano Concerto; it showed, among other things, where Gershwin got some of his later inspiration. The music that earned Copland cries of "Ogre!" when he first played it with the Boston Symphony in 1927, seemed slightly comic today, a parÓdy of all the ragtime and razzmatazz that were its musical contemporaries.
On the same program was a sample of modern jazz, Larry Austin's Improvisations for Orchestra and Jazz Soloists, in which Trumpeter Don Ellis, Drummer Joe Cocuzzo and Bassist Barre Phillips took off on some flights of fancy that had their opposite numbers among the Philharmonic deskmen slackjawed. Ellis hit licks on the music stand with the mouthpiece of his trumpet; Phillips performed tricks of bowing that Juilliard never taught. It was loud, and toward the end, it was every-man-for-himself. But it was also great fun for the performers and audience alike.
Another concert featured Edgard Varese's Deserts, written in 1954. It shows its age today but in a strangely prophetic way: the synthesis of electronic-tape sounds and live music is now the rage among young avant-garde composers. By alternately contrasting the outer-space grunts and chitterings of his tapes with the conventional tones of live orchestra passages, Varese achieves an organized whole.