Ham & Pineapple

It was early in Tanglewood's season, and the sounds that came out of the Berkshire woods were more cacophonous than symphonic. In the vast Music Shed, a student orchestra was rehearsing; in a nook of the carefully pruned gardens, a student agonized in solitude with his French horn. Strolling amid these sights & sounds was a short chunk of a man with a square face and a wild mane, who looked like a composer. He was--he was also guest of honor at Serge Koussevitzky's Berkshire Music Festival. His name: Arthur Honegger.

Composer Honegger, now 55, had been, 30 years ago, one of the noisiest of the famed French Six (only two others, Milhaud and Poulenc, ever amounted to anything). In those days in Paris, Swiss Composer Honegger had spent as much time talking as composing, and his talk was mainly directed, against the pernicious influence of jazz and the "street fair." He wanted his music to be austere.

In five years he had turned out the two works on which his fame still rests: Le Roi David and Pacific 231, a huffing, chuffing orchestral description of a locomotive getting under way. In his oratorio-like Le Roi David he perfected his own trick of plaiting two huge, serpentine strands of melody into a dissonant, sometimes arid, fabric of harmony. He went on to write some 60 works, including four symphonies, also twenty-odd French and English movie scores (Mayerling, Pygmalion), a medium which he prefers to opera.

Last week, between teaching classes in composition at Tanglewood, Composer Honegger toyed with a lunch of roast ham and pineapple (a gastronomic dissonance he had never encountered in France) and talked about his music. He had no favorites: "Our works are rather like our children, children that are grown up and married. Once completed, they start on a life of their own." The Boston Symphony scheduled one of the children, Symphony for Strings, for its first major Berkshire concert next week.

Honegger's next project is music for a stage production of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, with sets by Picasso, to be given in Paris next winter. Said he: "That is, I am trying to work on it. They keep me very busy here--lessons both morning and afternoon with one hour for lunch. . . ."

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