Music: Who Said Garbage?

Many contemporary composers, says peppery Composer David Diamond, 41, are engaged in “filling up the garbage cans of 20th century music” in “bad imitations of Igor Stravinsky.” Their worst sin is writing purely “from their brains” instead of their souls. Last week Rochester-born Composer Diamond sat in Manhattan’s Carnegie Hall while the result of his most recent soul-searching, his Sixth Symphony, was performed by Charles Munch and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. It seemed at times as if Diamond was unhappily living up to his own thesis.

His 23-minute work was strident, percussion-packed (including chromatic timpani, gavel, tubular bells, xylophone, glockenspiel and gong), full of rhythmic and harmonic shocks. It all came pouring from his inner self, says Diamond, in a kind of continuous stream of consciousness. Now he would like to return to his home in Florence, Italy to pursue his meandering musical consciousness as time and money permit. This winter, however, his fortunes were so low that he was forced to take a job fiddling in the pit orchestra of Leonard Bernstein’s Candide.

Some of Diamond’s colleagues also heard from last week: ¶J Alan Hovhaness’ Easter Cantata got its first New York concert performance by the National Orchestral Association under Guest Conductor Newell Jenkins. Mystically described by Armenian-descended Composer Hovhaness (“The vocal element … is the sun; the other sounds are the planets”), the work moved with melodic simplicity, derived its main effects from the repetitive. Oriental-sounding accompaniment which has helped to distinguish Hovhaness’ output from more technique-tortured works of his contemporaries. ¶J Italian Composer Riccardo Malipiero’s 45-minute Sinfonia Cantata was premiered on the same program. A musical evocation of America, the work draws its text from poems in four different languages, all in different ways evoking the New World. Italy’s Dino Campana sees classical images that compare the noble Indian savage to Venus, Federico Garcia Lorca’s Brooklyn Bridge Nocturne throbs with Spanish symbolism, while France’s Jules Laforgue dreams in Gallic-materialist specifics (“Des venaisons, et du whisky. . . et la loi de Lynch”) and Walt Whitman shambles forth in his pagan-hobo way, singing The Song of the Open Road. Trying to follow each poet’s vision, the music seemed to have little vision of its own, but it was skillfully scored. It evoked a lusty boo or two along with the applause in usually well-mannered Carnegie Hall. ¶Ernst Krenek’s one-act opera. The Bell Tower, was premiered at the University of Illinois’ Festival of Contemporary Arts, proved to be a stark, tight, declamatory work with a plot revolving about the dark deeds of a diabolical bell caster, Banna-donna. The score by Vienna-born Composer Krenek, 56, impressed critics with its taut musical line, its continually high-tension sense of drama.