Music: Beat Symphonist?

Are young U.S. composers, like poets and novelists, turning beat? The New York Times’s Howard Taubman suggested the question last week in commenting on the New York premiere of Symphony No. 1 by 25-year-old Indianapolis-born Easley Blackwood. The work’s jaded tone, said Critic Taubman, marked it as “a reflection of the beat generation.”

Blackwood’s composition, performed by Charles Munch and the Boston Symphony, was grave, withdrawn, and emotionally muted to a kind of rasping, wearied monotone. It nevertheless revealed Blackwood as a skilled technician and a stoutly original musical thinker. The winner of a recording project prize last season, the symphony will be released commercially by RCA Victor.

The son of Bridge Expert Easley Blackwood, father of the Blackwood four-notrump convention, Composer Blackwood studied at Yale under Paul Hindemith, moved on to Paris, where he became a student of Nadia Boulanger, for 35 years the musical nanny of top U.S. composers (TIME, Sept. 30, 1957). Now an instructor in the music department at the University of Chicago, Blackwood insists that his composition has no direct connection “with the times in which we live.” Does he regard himself as beat? “Anybody looking at my picture,” says Blackwood, “could tell that I am not.”