Youthful vigor finding its own way into the musical future

Music may be the international language, but there are dangerous parallels between late-20th-century composition and the Tower of Babel.

The past 50 years have seen (and listened to) a chain of touchy counter-proposals of musical aesthetics, which in the '60s prompted American composer Charles Wuorinen to remark, "How can there be a musical avant-garde, when the revolution before last said `Anything Goes'?"

But now the Fourth International Sound Ways Festival of Contemporary Music provides a fine opportunity to review the issues from a fresh perspective.

With this biannual festival, first organized in 1989, the city of St Petersburg reasserts its claim as the nerve-center of Russian musical life.

Comprising 12 concerts from November 13-21, the festival is being organized through the Composers' Union by Alexander Radvilovich.

"First of all, the program is oriented towards the younger audience, and the concerts feature a great many young Russian performers, and pieces by young composers," said Mr Radvilovich.

"Second, the festival takes a big hand in presenting concert performances of those pieces written during this century, which are already well known in the West and have already achieved status as 20-century classics, but of which it was impossible to arrange performances before perestroika."

The opening concert is given by the Sound Ways Ensemble, featuring pianists Oleg Malov and Galina Kulish, on Monday, November 13.

In addition to music by George Rochberg and Nicholas Slonimsky, the program features George Crumb's "Eleven Echoes of Autumn," a mixed quartet well representative of the delicate texture of Crumb's scores.

A piano recital given by Pi-hsien Chen on Thursday, November 16, features Schoenberg's Suite Opus 25, which includes some of Schoenberg's earliest applications of his "Composition With 12 Tones" which has since achieved so much notoriety.

Also on the recital are Boulez' Third Sonata, and Stockhausen's Piano Piece VI.

On Saturday, November 18, soprano Sigune von Osten will sing two cycles by Olivier Messiaen, the "Songs of Earth and Heaven" and the "Poems for Mi." Messiaen's mother, the poetess Cecile Sauvage, wrote him a set of poems while he was yet in the womb.

The "Songs of Earth and Heaven" was inspired by the birth of Messiaen's own son Pascal, and is an artistic reply to his mother's poetry.

Sigune von Osten has performed the Russian premieres of "Le Marteau Sans Maitre" ("The Hammer Without a Craftsman") by Pierre Boulez, "Harawi" by Olivier Messiaen.

She also sings in the closing concert of the festival, a setting by Paul Hindemith of "Das Marienleben" ("The Life of Mary") by Rainer Maria Rilke, composed in 1922.

Hindemith's music is not at all avant-garde, although it did shock the conservatives of his day; the occasion for this performance is the centenary of the composer's birth.

It has been typical of avant-garde composers to spend at least as much energy promoting their music as writing it.

The artistic pitfall here is when the composer becomes as much ideologue as musician. Perhaps more.

But a composer should have something to say, which is a matter of personal development; and he should train himself to say it artistically, which is a matter of mastering a discipline.

When a composer shirks the actual labor of creation for the relative ease of discussing it, his music becomes a mirror of the title of Boulez' masterpiece, "The Hammer Without a Craftsman."

Now, does anybody have a sickle?

* See Festival Guide for details.