Classical Hipsters

Composers used to like nothing better than to sit down at the harpsichord or pianoforte and improvise on their own works. Bach, Handel and Beethoven were as well known for their improvisations as for their written compositions. Now Composer-Pianist Lukas Foss, 38, is contriving, with the help of a $10,000 Rockefeller grant, to put the long dead custom back into classical music--and make it an en semble art.

The idea of "controlled improvisation" to free classical music from its "slavery to the printed note" first occurred to Composer Foss while listening to the high-brow jazz of the Modern Jazz Quartet three years ago. Foss invited a group of classical players--all former composition students of his at U.C.L.A.--to get together and improvise freely in a classical counterpart to the jazz manner. They soon had to give up that approach: "We just daydreamed; we didn't make music." What he was looking for, Foss realized, was a group improvisation in which every player would in some way be responsible to the others.

Pivotal Notes. Foss began to construct a system built around a series of pre-agreed pivotal notes and a system of letters that indicated what roles the various instruments were to assume at differ ent times. Now he has abandoned the idea of pivotal notes, but the group still starts with "a certain musical vision," worked out in countless rehearsals and set down in graphs and Foss's own specially devised symbols. "If we hit something good," says Foss, "we try to remember it. If something bad, we try to forget it." The technique, insist the players, is far more complex than that of jazz. "It's the difference between playing slapjack and playing bridge."

Foss and his group of composer-performers, known as the Improvisation Chamber Ensemble, appeared at Carnegie Hall last week with the visiting Philadelphia Orchestra to display their technique in somewhat elaborated form. Their scheduled piece, certainly the oddest they have yet attempted, was titled Concerto for Improvising Solo Instruments and Orchestra. Pianist Foss and his men--flute, cello, clarinet and percussion-were ranged downstage in front of the orchestra, and Conductor Eugene Ormandy only rarely cast a nervous backward glance at them.

Controlled Chance. The Concerto consisted of three movements, actually written down for the orchestra by different members of the ensemble and "edited" by Foss. The music was rather faceless--tricked out with a full Modern Composer's Kit of dissonances, rhythmic angularities, splashy climaxes. Against this background, Foss and the ensemble worked out their improvisations. It was in the Intermezzo, when the orchestra was silent, that Foss's technique of "controlled chance" came into fullest play. The Foss ensemble was free to improvise --and it did, with some highly interesting results. The instruments traded themes, stitched their own sinewy figurations, advanced and retreated from the solo role.

For the most part the effect was spare and angular--a little like the small-toned, pointillistic compositions of Anton von Webern.

Innovator Foss, who is back teaching at U.C.L.A. after a year's sabbatical for composition, does not expect his system to replace the written score. He himself has just completed a fully written-out composition, Time Cycle, for Soprano and Orchestra (to texts by Auden, Housman, Kafka and Nietzsche), which will be played for the first time by the New York Philharmonic this week. Between numbers, Foss's ensemble will do improvised "commentaries" on the songs. With the spread of controlled improvisation, Foss thinks the day may come when a typical concert will begin with bits of Bartok or Beethoven and, in between, feature the members of a chamber group spinning out their own trackless flights of fancy.

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