Music: Teen-Age Atonalists

“People are going to be shocked.” said an 18-year-old soprano. She was right. When the 55 youngsters of the Princeton (N.J.) High School Choir performed in West Berlin, audiences were indeed shocked, but they were also delighted. People who had turned up expecting to hear such staples as Surrey with the Fringe on Top, got a dose of Anton Webern—the complex Cantatas Nos. 1 and 2—plus a Buxtehude cantata and Bach’s Magnificat. As it passed the mid-point of its month-long tour of Europe last week, the choir had collected a scrapbook full of glowing reviews. The fact that teenagers could sing music of such complexity, wrote the critic of The Hague’s Vrije Volk, was “nothing short of staggering.” Back home in Princeton, people are no longer staggered; their high school choir has been singing difficult music for them for an atonal decade. Among the group’s achievements: Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms. Honegger’s King David, the premiere of Roger Sessions’ Mass. Invited to sing before the International Musicological Society Congress last fall, the choir caught the ear of the visiting European musicians, soon became the first U.S. high school group to receive a State Department cultural exchange grant. With additional community contributions, the choir took off on a 17-concert European tour that ends next week in London. Everywhere it went, it astonished audiences with its mature understanding of a tough repertory. “What school in Europe ” asked a critic last week, “sings difficult cantatas from Webern?” Choir Director Thomas Hilbish started steering the choir away from show tunes and toward Webern when he took over 14 years ago. His theory is that “it is better to educate with intelligent music than entertainment music”; and by the testimony of his choir members he has been proved correct: virtually nobody wants to quit the choir, which now compares favorably, in the opinion of as knowing a judge as Composer Sessions, with many a professional group.