Lennie's Grand Old Men

At the New York Philharmonic's "preview" concert last week, Conductor Leonard Bernstein, looking like a conjurer, proudly produced from the wings a trio of musical pioneers. "They are," said Lennie happily, "the real article--salty, peppery, unconventional and eternally young in spirit." Onto the stage to take their bows came Lennie's "grand old men": Wallingford Riegger, 73; John Becker, 72; Carl Ruggles, 82. The trio's presence in Carnegie Hall lent substance to Lennie's argument that the history of U.S. symphonic music can be pretty well traced in the span of a single lifetime.

P: Georgia-born Composer Riegger has the largest reputation of the three. A cellist, Riegger studied in Germany, dabbled in conducting, vigorously booed the early works of the pre-Schoenberg atonalists then being performed in Berlin. But when he turned to serious composition himself at 35, he soon welcomed the twelve-tone idiom as a means of "breaking through the inhibitions of my early surroundings." His own Study in Sonority (which Fellow Composer Henry Cowell called "the choiring of angels") was roundly hissed in 1929 at Carnegie Hall. Since then, Atonalist Riegger has supported himself by teaching and arranging (including arrangements for Tea for Two and Shortnin' Bread), has produced a steady stream of craggily dissonant, heavily percussioned works that have earned him a number of awards, almost no money. His Music for Orchestra, performed last week, was a busy, brawling but tightly disciplined work, as brassy as a night in a carnival tent.

P: Kentucky-born John Becker, a less finished composer than Riegger, has taught music in the Middle West most of his life, produced a steady supply of modernist works, including seven symphonies, few of which have received major performances. His strongly didactic compositions take their themes from such varied sources as Alfred Kreymborg's Ballad of Fallen France, the Gettysburg Address, the Sermon on the Mount. His Symphonia Brevis, which Bernstein fished out of obscurity last week, was written in 1929 "with an outraged spirit . . . a protest against a world civilization which starves its millions in peacetime and destroys these same millions in wartime." Whatever its purpose, it was distinguished by massed sonorities, long, elegiac melodic lines and big, crashing climaxes.

P: Massachusetts-born Carl Ruggles has added to his income in recent years by his abstract paintings, which bring him as much as $800 apiece from purchasers including the Whitney and Brooklyn Museums. A onetime conductor, he shocked audiences in the 1920s with roughhewn works which by now sound almost romantic. Last week's audience took his sweeping, spacious Men and Mountains with scarcely a whimper (despite Bernstein's warning about "crazy modern music"). Ruggles still composes steadily at his home in Vermont, at times using mural-size sheets of paper, drawing the large, fat notes in crayons of different colors. His life illustrates the crotchety spirit of independence that animated America's musical trail blazers: in a characteristic spasm of selfcriticism, he ripped to shreds the score of his only opera shortly after the Metropolitan had finally accepted it and set a performance date.

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