18 - Serialism and complexity

Summary

In the fall of 1961 regular readers of the New York Times would have encountered a pair of brief articles published a day apart which, while unexceptional individually, are striking, at least in retrospect, in their juxtaposition. Thursday, September 7 of that year saw the publication of a short review (Salzman 1961) of a concert sponsored by the Fromm Music Foundation. Presented the previous evening at the Metropolitan Museum of Art under the aegis of the International Musicological Society, which was holding its eighth congress at Columbia University from September 5 to September 12 (with ancillary events at Yale and Princeton Universities and at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. [LaRue 1962]), the concert offered only three works. Of these the first two – Vision and Prayer for soprano and synthesized accompaniment, by Milton Babbitt (born 1916), and the Double Concerto, by Elliott Carter (born 1908) – were world premieres, both commissioned by the Fromm Foundation. The third – the Concerto for Violin, Cello, Ten Winds and Percussion by Leon Kirchner (born 1919) – was a New York premiere.

The following day the New York Times printed an unattributed piece (anon. 1961) announcing details of the New York Philharmonic’s new subscription season that was doubtless read with greater anticipation by the majority of readers. According to the article, Leonard Bernstein would frame the season with two special “cycles,” the “Gallic Approach” and the “Teutonic Approach,” occupying the first and last six weeks respectively of the orchestra’s calendar. The French cycle featured not only the works of French composers but also works of “French influenced American composers,” and similarly for the German cycle.