No. 4

Pennsylvania-born Peter Mennin is something of a phenomenon among U.S. composers: at 25, he has already had three symphonies performed, and he is not a bit complacent about it. With a grin, he dismisses his first symphony, composed at 17, as "too damn long." He says, "Let's just forget about the Second"--even though it won the Gershwin and Beams prizes in 1945.

Mennin's Third ("the so-called popular one," he calls it) has been played in Pittsburgh, Cleveland and in Sweden, and got first-string Manhattan critics out two years ago. The New York Times noted "a conspicuous advance."

Sounds Impractical. Last week, a Carnegie Hall audience got to hear just how much further tall, slender Composer Mennin had advanced. In picking his symphonic form, he had tried something that even Beethoven had never attempted until he was past 50 and had eight great symphonies to his credit. Mennin's Fourth, "The Cycle," was an ambitious choral symphony in which he worked out the chorus in all three movements instead of just the last (as Beethoven did in his Ninth). Said Mennin: "I know a piece that takes so many performers is impractical, but I wanted to write it anyway."

After hearing mop-haired young Conductor Robert Shaw lead his Collegiate Chorale and members of the New York Philharmonic through Mennin's Fourth last week, listeners and critics were glad the composer had gone ahead. At times, the Fourth sounded as if it were about to sound like someone else; there were Stravinsky-like dissonances, used sparingly and for punctuation, in the opening of the rhythmic first movement, and there were Hindemith or Shostakovich traces in the lyric andante. But each time, and overall, the music came out strongly Mennin--energetically powerful, open and clean.

Sounds Corny. Neither of Peter's Italian-born parents was a musician, but for their home in Erie, Pa. they bought a phonograph and taught sons Peter and Lewis (Lewis is now 28 and a composer-teacher at the University of Texas) to listen to records. Says Peter: "Sounds corny, but I always liked Beethoven." He was set to studying sight-reading at seven, could read music before he could play an instrument, still plays "terrible piano." At 17, he went to Ohio's Oberlin Conservatory, then after a spell in the Air Force, took his degrees (including a Ph.D.) at Rochester's Eastman School of Music.

Now a composition instructor at the Juilliard School of Music, Peter finds that "if you lead a normal life, you have more time to compose." Anyway, he says, "to be bohemian is old hat." He and his violinist wife, Georganne, 24, whom he met at Eastman and married last year, manage to stay out of each other's artistic hair by dividing up their six-room apartment on Riverside Drive: he composes in a room at one end of the apartment while she practices in a room at the other.

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