Out of the Fashion

After four years in Europe on three different fellowships, the young American composer Benjamin Lees was fast approaching the day when he would become a public trust. He labored quietly over his compositions, as first Guggenheim, then Copley, then Fulbright supported him. He wrote a symphony and some chamber music, but the peak of his abstraction came in 1958, when he spent eight months writing a violin concerto. Lacking a virtuoso to play it, he stuffed it away in a steamer trunk.

But last week Composer Lees heard his notes turned to music. Violinist Henryk Szeryng and the Boston Symphony Orchestra performed Lees's Violin Concerto in two New York concerts, and its excellence, together with the skimpy monetary rewards he can expect, make a very good case for giving Lees and other gifted composers like him a never-ending grant to keep them going. In an age when almost no composers are turning their talents to the delicate mysteries of the violin concerto, Lees has written a small masterpiece. If all goes well and it is played a half-dozen times, he may earn as much as $200 from the concerto over the next few years.

Lees is as boldly out of fashion in musical form as he is cheerfully out of step by choosing to be a composer of serious music. His concerto violates the three-movement, fast-slow-fast style that has persisted since Mozart. The work opens with two brooding, songful movements in which the adagio percolates a single theme, refining it in major and minor statements. The minor key takes over in the excited cross-rhythms of the rondo finale, where "all hell breaks loose," says Lees happily. Lees's music is devilishly hard to play. After performing it, Szeryng pronounced the concerto "the most difficult piece I've ever tackled."

Such successes are about all Lees can expect from his music. "If you start asking yourself why art doesn't pay and how you can make it pay, you've got a problem that will kill you," he says. "It's enough to work out something in music that will carry a little personal conviction. That is my aim--to create a personal idiom." To do it, Lees works steadily in his home in Hyattsville, Md., and at the moment, he is busy writing three works (including an oboe concerto) at once. Two days a week, he drives to Baltimore to teach composition at the Peabody Conservatory. That diversion pays him more in a month than writing music at home brings him in a year.

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