Diddlidong at Dartmouth

deeboop, "Diddlidong, sboop," dee, sang the tong, boopeepee-sweater-clad conductor to the orchestra. Then, raising his baton, he said: "Now -- again?"

Frowning, the musicians tried again to make all the diddlidongs and sboops in German Composer Hans Werner Henze's In Memoriam: Die Weisse Rose sound the way the conductor said they should. And the conductor was in a position to know. It was Henze himself, rehearsing for the first of two concerts of his works last week in Hopkins Center on the campus of Dartmouth Col lege in Hanover, N.H.

Tired of Beethoven. With two more concerts to come this week, Henze, at 41, is presenting what amounts to a retrospective show: eleven pieces com posed between 1946 and 1965, including four premieres. It is all part of Dartmouth's five-year-old Congregation of the Arts, which each summer invites three composers to a fortnight of per forming, reviewing and explaining a representative sample of their music. Carlos Chavez, the late Zoltan Kodaly and Witold Lutoslawski are among past composers in residence; Frank Martin and Aaron Copland are Henze's predecessor and successor this year.

The performers at Dartmouth include a core of 20 professionals from such ensembles as the Houston, St. Louis and Metropolitan Opera orchestras, plus 100 students from Juilliard, Oberlin and other collegiate music centers. The students go partly to rub elbows with the pros, and the pros are drawn by the opportunity to play an eight-week festival of largely contemporary music. "You do get tired of playing Beethoven sonatas," explains Violinist Stuart Canin, who spends his winters as concertmaster of the Philadelphia Chamber Symphony. "Here you can be a creative musician again."

The Gap. Above all, the performers go to learn contemporary music from the men who compose it. In the small, baldheaded, intense figure of Henze, they confront a man whose intricately structured atonal writing has placed him in the first rank of European composers (TIME, May 24, 1963). "We give the composer and the performer the greatest possible contact," says Mario di Bonaventura, the Dartmouth music professor who directs the program. "It gives the performers an edge of confidence. They can always say, 'I played with Henze, and there's no doubt that I know how to play this.' "

As Henze led rehearsals last week--singing to illustrate his intentions, explaining why parts were written as they were, identifying errors in the printed score--it was clear that he was learning too. "If a musician asks me 'Why this?' and explains why it is difficult for him, he teaches me," says Henze. "There is a gap of understanding today between the composer and performers. Most composers don't care what kind of human being plays the music, and they make it too often senselessly difficult. If a musician insists that a passage is unplayable, I'll alter it. Nowadays, when everything is done by machinery, I think it is wonderful that something is left that can be done by hand--like love and music."

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