Composition by the Numbers

Borrowing from your own, or some other nation's, storehouse of folk music is an old composer's trick. Dvorak and Puccini used U.S. tunes. Tchaikovsky not only reworked Russia's own Song of the Volga Boatmen but borrowed a bar or two from Italian music. Ravel, Chabrier and Rimsky-Korsakov took from the Spanish; Aaron Copland from the Mexicans. Last week the U.S.S.R. and the U.S. decided to work each other's musical gold mines officially.

The American-Soviet Music Society gave visiting Soviet Journalist Ilya Ehrenburg five earthy old U.S. ballads for Soviet composers to work from. Ehrenburg promised five Russian-written chamber music pieces based on the songs, in time for U.S. performance next season. He also agreed to send five old Russian folk songs for U.S. composers to put in new bottles.

The five he will take with him: He's Gone Away, an old North Carolina love song; Black Is the Color of My True Love's Hair, an Elizabethan ballad still sung in the Southern mountains; the square dancers' Old Joe Clark; the spiritual Joshua Fit de Battle of Jericho; the cowboys' Old Chisholm Trail.

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