Plum Pudding

Leon Kirchner is little known outside an energetic circle of highbrow musicians, but he is one of the most promising U.S. composers. At 35 he has won his share of prizes, among them a $5,000 award from the University of California, a National Institute of Arts and Letters award, a Walter W. Naumburg Foundation award, two Guggenheim fellowships, the imposing New York Music Critics Circle award.

Last week Composer Kirchner. an associate professor of music at U.S.C., added a new plum to his rich pudding: he was named a full professor at California's up-to-date Mills College, whose faculty already includes famed French Composer Darius Milhaud.

The son of a New York City embroidery manufacturer, Leon Kirchner astounded his piano teacher by the time he was nine, was appearing in recitals and concerts at 14. But his mother wanted him to be a doctor, and he dutifully set out on a scientific education in Los Angeles (where the family moved in 1928). But music had him beguiled, particularly after he first heard compositions by Arnold Schoenberg. "A lecturer had described Schoenberg's work, all about the twelve-tone scale. As I listened I became frightened--afraid that if I listened to this strange music I might never be the same. Then, a night later, I forced myself to go to a concert of Pierrot Lunaire. It was a tremendous experience ... I turned to a friend and said: "That's the kind of music I have always expected; it's not strange at all." "You Are Insane." Music courses began slipping into Kirchner's scientific curriculum, including a course in composition from Professor Schoenberg himself. Kirchner finally abandoned science and plunged wholly into music. He had great potentialities as a pianist, but chose composition.

"Somehow, I didn't feel I had the constitution to be a concert artist," he says now. "That's a terribly demanding life, you know. You go insane trying to reach perfection." From Schoenberg ("an extremely articulate, extraordinarily precise man") Kirchner had learned that "any great teacher tries to teach you the why of things--not just chords, but 'why' chords. He teaches you how to extend music in time.'' Later, Kirchner studied with Ernest Bloch, learning from the noted composer "to respect the use, the real function, of materials." His next teacher was Roger Sessions, with whom Kirchner worked in 1942 and again after the war. Sessions, Kirchner believes, is America's greatest composer, and he also has "an amazing ability to see talent. He is a man of great intelligence." "Writing Is Funny." Kirchner was a man of considerable ability himself by 1947, and he began turning out his share of compositions. One of the most imposing to date: his first String Quartet, a Bartok-ian piece with a now-gritty, now-smooth character, scalp-tingling dissonances, and immense technical facility.

At Mills (enrollment: 500), a women's college that also takes men for graduate work, Kirchner will share duties largely with Composer Milhaud, 61, who alternates yearly between Mills and the Paris Conservatory. When Milhaud is absent, Kirchner will teach composition; at other times he will instruct in harmony, counterpoint, form and analysis. "I shall write and I shall teach. When I teach. I shall try to do one thing: I would like to show my students what I have learned from men like Sessions and Bloch and Schoenberg. As for my writing--writing is funny.

The more you learn, the better you get--and the more you realize how far you are from perfection. It is a driving, compelling thing; not easy, and never secure. And yet, I could do nothing else."

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