Sony’s Fromm Collection: Lukas Foss

1960 photograph of Lukas Foss conducting at the University of California at Los Angeles (photographer unknown, from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

As was observed about two weeks ago, the Twentieth Century Composers Series, financed by the Fromm Music Foundation, resulted in eight recordings, the last of which, presenting concertos by Elliott Carter and Leon Kirchner, was discussed this past Tuesday. However, the box set released by Sony Classical to anthologize this project consists of ten CDs. This ninth of these presented two recorded premieres of compositions by Lukas Foss that had been commissioned by the Fromm Foundation.

As can be seen on his Wikipedia page, Foss’ career was literally all over the map. When I survey the breadth of it all, I am reminded of a line from Bernard Pomerance’s play The Elephant Man, when the title character says “Sometimes I think my head is so big because it is so full of dreams.” Having encountered Foss at work on a generous number of occasions during his lifetime, I have some sense of the breadth of dreams that were knocking around in his head, few (if any) of which ever came to satisfactory fulfillment.

His support from the Fromm Foundation came at a time when the foremost of those dreams involved “liberating” practices of improvisation from the jazz domain and bringing them into the scope of “serious” music. To this end he founded and led a quartet called the Improvisation Chamber Ensemble, in which he was the pianist. The other three members were clarinetist Richard Dufallo, cellist Howard Colf, and percussionist Charles DeLancey.

That group performs the second selection on the Sony CD, the chamber version of Time Cycle. This was a cycle of four songs, setting texts by W. H. Auden, A. E. Housman, Franz Kafka, and Friedrich Nietzsche, scored for orchestra and soprano. The premiere performance was given in 1961 by the New York Philharmonic conducted by Leonard Bernstein, and the Improvisation Chamber Ensemble provided improvised interludes between the songs. In the chamber music version the songs are accompanied by that Ensemble. (Once again, the texts are illegible on the reverse side of the sleeve for this CD, a reduced reproduction of the same side of the original album jacket.)

It has been so long since I have heard the New York Philharmonic recording that I have absolutely no idea how much of the chamber version is given over to improvisation. What I do recall, however, is that, for the most part, efforts to take jazz as a point of departure for new approaches to genres such as chamber music tended to be grounded in a poor understanding of jazz practices. By way of comparison, Gunther Schuller had a much better understanding of those practices when he began to explore what he and his colleagues called “third stream” music. (Back in 1950 Schuller played French horn for four of the tracks on Miles Davis’ Birth of the Cool album.) That same time frame saw Lennie Tristano finding his own path to the classical domain, particularly in his solo piano work (some of which was probably known to Bernstein). Then, of course, there was Cecil Taylor, who probably knew as much about Karlheinz Stockhausen as he knew about traditional and modern jazz practices. Finally, there were the experiments in alternative notions that led to the practices of indeterminacy by John Cage and his New York School colleagues, Earle Brown, Morton Feldman, and Christian Wolff.

In all of that context, Foss’ approaches to improvisation come off as “a day late and a dollar short.” Time Cycle leaves the impression of being little more than an abstract assemblage of notes. Whether those notes originated from notation or improvisation does not appear to make very much of a difference. Furthermore, it is unclear just how (or even if) the composer saw this as music that could “travel” to performance by other musicians.

That issue arises in the first selection of the Sony CD. Echoi is a four-movement suite that was also written for the Improvisation Chamber Ensemble. However, the recording is made by a quartet with the same instrumentation but different players, called the Group for Contemporary Music at Columbia University. In this quartet the pianist is Charles Wuorinen, joined by clarinetist Arthur Bloom, cellist Robert Martin, and percussionist Raymond DesRoches. Foss composed this piece after Time Cycle in 1963, but it precedes Time Cycle on the Sony recording. (On the original release, the two pieces would fill the two sides of a long-playing record, allowing for more flexibility in how one could choose to listen.)

In the context of the entire Fromm collection, Foss’ compositions may have been the most adventurous in their ambitions. However, in the journey from theory to practice, it seems as if those ambitions should have been “made of sterner stuff.” Given the combination of the recent past and the experienced present that occupied creativity in the first years of the Sixties, there may be a cautionary tale behind the failure of Foss’ ventures into improvisation to leave much of a mark.