Music: Atonal Choir

The singers looked like refugees from a college prom—the girls in powder blue tunics and the men in white dinner jackets. With their chubby-faced leader, they seemed in direct line of descent from Fred Waring and his Pennsylvanians. But the music the Gregg Smith Singers performed last week at the avant-garde Contemporary Music Festival at Darmstadt, Germany, was as tortuously difficult as any being written. After listening to the visitors soar with uncanny ease through the continuing complexities of Schonberg, Krenek and Ives, Darmstadt Director Wolfgang Steinecke paid a rare tribute: the group was, he said, “Bestes Ameri-ka”—the best of America.

Rhythm & Pitch. Ernst Krenek’s atonal Santa Fe Time Table was in itself enough to put a tremolo in the larynx of most singers. A long, desert-dry work, its lyrics is a list of all the station names between Albuquerque and Los Angeles* The chorus rattled down the right-of-way like a highballing freight, then proceeded to an even more formidable test: Schonberg’s late works, Dreimal

Tausend Jahre and De Profundis, plus the early Opus 27.

What astonished the audience was the singers’ ability to negotiate Schonberg’s dissonances and steep intervals with a familiarity that made the composer seem almost as accessible as the Gemutlichkeitladen German romantics. Sinewy and biting, the music called for an unerring sense of rhythm and pitch, and the Gregg Smith Singers responded on cue like a well-oiled machine. Conductor Smith had arranged his twelve male and 13 female singers cannily, spreading them across the entire width of the stage in an arc that gave breadth and transparency to the group sound. It was, said a delighted local critic, “perhaps the first thoroughly enjoyable evening of dodecaphonic music in the history of that difficult medium.”

Inherent Logic. The Gregg Smith Singers have a fast-growing reputation in Europe, but they are virtually unknown in the U.S. Chicago-born Conductor Smith, 30, who “wanted to be a choir leader for as long as I can remember,” established the group at the Los Angeles Japanese Methodist Church in 1955. At full strength it now numbers nearly 60 singers—white, Negro, Japanese, Hawaiian and Chinese. Explains pert, pony-tailed Soprano Uta Shimotskuka, 23: “With a good group like this, it was easy to attract many young singers who heard that we preferred Orlando di Lasso, Palestrina and also Faure and Poulenc to the inevitable Handel and Mendelssohn.”

The group has been invited to Europe three times (it is now on an eight-week tour), made a highly successful appearance at the Brussels World Fair in 1958. Although it has always labored under a deficit, times are getting better: Stravinsky heard the singers in Los Angeles in 1959, was so impressed that he conducted them in his Les Noces and Symphony of Psalms. Columbia will soon issue a Gregg Smith album. As the group’s popularity grows, Conductor Smith thinks it will accomplish his most cherished ambition: to popularize modern music through “the inherent logic of the human voice.”

-In the opening bars, for instance, the singers work their way through “Albuquerque, Isleta, Dalies, Rio Puerco, Suwanee, Laguna, Acomita,” and the piece ends with “Pasadena, Highland Park, Los Angeles River, Los Angeles.”