Louisville Begins

Chief condition for a composer's success: he must be dead.

Last spring, the Rockefeller Foundation decided to take some of the teeth out of this old composers' maxim, and began by bestowing a $400,000 grant on the Louisville Orchestra to enlarge that orchestra's program for commissioning and performing new works. One afternoon last week, while a goodly portion of the upper-middlebrow musical world waited for news of the proceedings, Louisville launched the new series.

The first work was Notturno, by Austria-born Ernst Toch, who now lives in California. It turned out to be a modest idyl that the 66-year-old composer describes as "visions of the night." Its strings and woodwinds sang sweetly, the orchestra played it well, and the small (about 200) crowd thought it was a fitting beginner for the series.

Conductor Robert Whitney was happy to start the project quietly; his load will grow in the next four years. This week he will repeat the Toch Notturno and add Sinfonietta Flamenca by Spain's Carlos Surinach. Next week he will repeat both and add Rhapsody for Orchestra by the University of Louisville's twelve-tone Composer George Perle. The following week he will repeat all three and add a new student work. After four performances, each work will be dropped and another new one substituted.

At the end of the first year, the orchestra will have performed 28 orchestral commissions (at $1,200 each), two one-act operas (at $2,000) and ten student-award pieces. Most of them, recorded by Columbia, will be sold on subscription, and tapes will be distributed to colleges, thus assuring each work as broad a hearing as any composer could hope for.

The Rockefeller program is a giant step for the Louisville Orchestra--from five major performances and 20 school programs a year to a year-round operation. Musicians who were earning up to $1,000 a season will now earn up to $3,500 for their orchestra work alone. Since many of them take their parts home to study, they will earn every penny of it.

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