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