Thanks to a timely heads-up from CLASSM-L list member John Wiser, I
Attended a concert by members of the Louisiana Philharmonic, conducted
by Associate Conductor Chris Kim, who also appears on-list occasionally.

The program used an interesting thread:  WPA composers and the artistic
ties between the Thirties and the Sixties - particularly the outreach
of composers to the general public through vernacular styles and the
importance of folk music.  We heard:

Jimi Hendrix: The Star-Spangled Banner
Hendrix-Weigel: The Star-Spangled Banner (orch. Weigel)
Weigel: In the Clubs
Guthrie: The Ballad of Tom Joad
Dylan: The Times They are A-Changing
Bacon: Elegy - In Memoriam Ansel Adams
Copland: Music for the Theater

The Weigel orchestration of Hendrix's solo confused me, since it had little
to do with the Hendrix solo (other than a couple of quotes), and I really
didn't listen to it on its own terms.  I'll have to hear it again.

In the Clubs was a knockout piece - a gorgeous, lyric opening, moving
toward a kind of jam session, and then subsiding.  What interested me
most was the form - highly unconventional.  It could have fallen into
incoherence, but it didn't.  What it left you with was continual surprise.
It reminded me a bit of Ives, but without the typical Ivesian tangle.

The two composed "folk songs" went well, and there's little that satisfies
me as much as a singer accompanying himself with an acoustic guitar.

Ernst Bacon (1898-1990) isn't exactly a household name.  I knew a bunch
of his songs and one orchestral piece (Ford's Theater) before the concert.
The only other thing I knew about him was that he married several times and
as he got older, the women got younger.  Conductor Kim filled in a little
more.  Bacon was a polymath - a mathematician of professional calibre, a
concert pianist, and a painter, as well as a composer.  He and Adams were
lifelong friends (Adams at one time also had ambitions to become a concert
pianist).  Bacon studied in Vienna with Schoenberg's circle and completely
rejected the serialism and atonality he was taught.  He found Bartok's
aims more similar to his own, although his music doesn't sound much like
Bartok's.  But like other American composers of the time, he wanted to
make an American concert music based on folk melos and rhythms.  This is
definitely the best piece of his I've heard, although for me it goes on
just a hair too long.  Nevertheless, it's sturdily made and the ideas are
clear and forthright.  Bacon apparently wrote a mountain of stuff, and he
seems to promise rewards for exploration.

The Copland, of course, is the best-known classical piece on the program.
The performance was fun, if a little scrappy.  Some of those Copland-jazz
rhythms you hang onto by your fingernails.  By the way, has anybody noticed
the similarity of the opening theme to "Three Blind Mice?" Copland seems
to throw in these old songs almost unconsciously - "Be it ever so humble,
there's no place like home" in Our Town and "Amazing Grace" in Emblems.

A very interesting and enjoyable program.

Steve Schwartz