AMERICAN BRASS MUSIC. American Brass Quintet ( John Eckert, trumpet; Gerard Schwarz, trumpet, cornet and flugelhorn; Edward Birdwell, French horn; Arnold Fromrne, tenor trombone; Robert Biddlecome, bass trombone). Nonesuch H71222 (25s.).

American Brass Music: Ives. From the Steeples and the Mountains (with the Carillon of Riverside Church, New York). Song for Harvest Season ( Jan DeGaetani mezzo-soprano). Chromatimelodtune (Phil Kaplan, field drum; Steve Marcus, bass drum; Claude Fontanella, cymbals). Brehm. Quintet for Brass. Brant. The Fourth Millennium. Phillips. Music for Brass Quintet.

Not one of these items has been recorded before, though each has a strong character of its own. In addition to being excellently recorded by Jerry Bruck, the performances are of the highest standard. This is evident, for example, in the latter pages of Peter Phillips's piece, which set many taxing problems both of individual execution and of ensemble. I last heard of Phillips (b.1930) as the composer of a concerto the drummer Max Roach performed at the 1958 Monterey Jazz Festival. The sleeve-note reads jazz contours into his Music for Brass Quintet also, but, the microtones and slow glissandi notwithstanding, that influence is in reality so subtle as to be absent altogether. Completed in 1967, this work's structure is dramatically conceived throughout, reaching fulfillment in the very fierce passages near the close of the final perpetuum mobile. Before that comes a violent scherzo and before that an opening movement whose initial tight interval-spans generate the shape of the whole. A fine and indeed exciting piece.

The Quintet of Alvin Brehm (h.1925), likewise, has a first movement developing continuously from terse opening motives through sensitive textures which, as in the other movements, are the result of highly effective writing for each instrument. All parts are virtuosic without containing any element of display. While the whole is well unified, each movement is strongly contrasted with the others: the deployment of muted and unmuted sounds in I is quite different from the toccata-like agitation of II or the chorale and variations that make up III.

Henry Brant (b.1913) has always been more stimulated by technical devices than by human experience, as were such composers as Charles Ives. In pieces like Galaxies he has explored the unexpected potentialities of instruments or, in Ceremony, of voices, and this has sometimes been without sufficient reference to structure. At the same time he has responded to Ives's portrayals of the multiplicity of sensation and produced works such as Antiphony I, wherein the orchestra is split into four separate groups. Like Brant's earlier Millennium No. 2, his Fourth Millennium included here is for two completely independent brass combinations instructed to play without reference to each other. The composer's own comments give some idea of what this highly entertaining yet most expertly written music is like: "Among those who survived the Grand Thermonuclear War are the two trumpets and trombone, grotesque and enfeebled, mutated creatures, no less egomaniacal than their ancestors. The horn and euphonium arrive from another planet, where the idea of war is idiotic and incomprehensible. The reaction of the Earthmen is sub-human gibbering. Realizing the visitors want to bring enlightenment, the Earthmen break into spastic frenzy, and then endeavour to kill the horn and euphonium. At first incredulous and then disgusted, the visitors depart and leave the burnt-out planet to its smug survivors". Needless to say, such a confrontation makes stereo especially welcome!

Ives's contributions are of almost Webernian brevity, From the Steeples being only lorty-eight bars long, Song for Harvest fasting under two minutes. But in terms of musical weight they are the most important items on this whole series of five LPs. From the Steeples is a typical Ives case—composed in 1901, first performed in 1965. Within its brief span it is almost as vividly evocative as his lovely Housatonic at Stockbridge (CBS), and calls for two sets of church bells performing scaled and arpeggiated figures and sustained clusters. B, C and D flat clash together, and against this pairs of trumpets _ and trombones move in jagged diversity. The compass of the bells goes beyond that of the normal orchestral set, and it is typical of the trouble taken over this LP that one of the largest church carillons in the world was sought out and recorded so the effect should be just as the composer wished. Written in 1894, Song for Harvest employs soprano, cornet, trombone and bass trombone, and the extreme freedom of these four parts is heightened by their being in four different keys simultaneously. Ives's first polytonal venture was earlier still—his America Variations of 1891. Being first is not important in art, yet it seems to me that his use of polytonality in these works is far more natural, arising more pointfully out of the music's growth, than in, say, Milhaud's considerably later Etudes for piano and orchestra or Fifth String Quartet (both 1920). Readers will find it fascinating to compare Song for Harvest with Ives's psalm and chorale settings (CBS), where the same tendencies are taken further. Too much already has been written about Ives's anticipations of twentieth-century techniques and not enough on the excellence of his music as such, but one should note that Chromatimelodtune (unmentioned in the Cowells' standard book on the composer) does, with its canonic exploitation of fixed melodic shapes and consistent use of all twelve notes, look forward to certain aspects of dodecaphonic method.

I do not know if Nonesuch are going to extend this series, but, if so, it is to be hoped there will be another disc by this ensemble, including such works as Carl Ruggles's Angels, Gunther Schuller's Brass Quintet, etc. Meanwhile, of the five records on this label I have dealt with in the current issue the above is the one to buy for it offers tough yet rewarding listening. M.H.