Music: Atonality for Tots

The audience might well have frightened any composer out of his augmented triads: it consisted of 600 moppets between five and twelve. Children, so the theory goes, are the ideal connoisseurs of modern music, because they have no built-in esthetic prejudices, and last week Venice’s prestigious International Festival of Contemporary Music paused in the midst of its strenuously avant-garde schedule to put the theory to the test. In the baroque Fenice Theater, the kids saw nine one-act Games and Fables for Children, composed on commission by a group of noted moderns.

Included in the program were German Composer Hans Werner Henze’s atonal, heavily percussioned fairy tale, The Emperor’s Nightingale; Polish-born Composer Alexander Tansman’s Stravinsky-flavored exercise, New Clothes for the King; Italian Composer Nino Rota’s The Cunning Squirrel. All three were hits. Henze’s work, in particular, won a shrill, twelve-minute ovation. But defenders of the moppets’ taste were badly shaken when Carlo Franci’s Final Comedy and Giorgio Ghedini’s Girotondo—both tricked up with flung pies, flying paintpots and banana-peel pratfalls—seemed to touch off a lot more enthusiasm than the serious moderns.

Critics were less amused than the audience. “Some of these composers,” said Corriere della Sera severely, “falsified their music to please the children. That means they have sold their souls to the devil, which disqualifies them to write for the innocent.” The final word was left to elegant, 62-year-old Composer-Critic Virgil Thomson. “I have no opinion on this performance,” said he, “because I think Venice is not for children anyway and can only be appreciated when one is over 70 years of age.”