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Bangs & Gurgles. At last week's windup, after a highly caloric helping of Tchaikovsky's Pathetique, Bernstein came onstage and said: "My dear friends, this week we are presenting the last group of avant-garde works" (loud applause). "Tonight is going to be the most avantgarde" (groans).
The opener was a short work composed by an English electronic computer named Pegasus. Soon came Cage, with 77-piece orchestra, each instrument bugged with a contact mike connected to a bank of amplifiers. Cage and an assistant took their places at the controls, David Tudor was seated at the piano, the mechanical conductor was helped to the podium. Suddenly all hell broke loose. Speakers around the hall blasted the output of various instruments at random, and a thunder sheet rumbled onstage. Some listeners dashed for shelter. At the one-quarter point, Pianist Tudor leaned his elbows on the keyboard with a great bang. At the halfway mark, the sound of a strike in a bowling alley echoed through the auditorium and more people got up to leave. Everything ended in eight minutes, on schedule, with a blast of horns and a salvo of boos and hisses from the audience. Several violinists nodded in agreement. After that, Morton Feldman's . . . Out of "Last Pieces" was pure anticlimax, a tinkly thing with harp plucks and oboe gurgles, like noodle soup going down a drain.
Those who stayed to hear Earle Brown's Available Forms II for Orchestra Four Hands were treated to a duel between two orchestras led by two (live) conductors. It ended with most of the musicians, most of the audience, and Leonard Bernstein himself laughing. Perhaps to keep from crying.