The Aim of an Honest Composer

William Bergsma is an elfin-faced, cowlicked and unabashed young man who says of himself: "I first took up the violin, didn't practice. Then the viola, didn't practice that either. So I became a composer." He has practiced that. At 29, he has to his credit a ballet suite, Paul Bunyan, half a dozen short orchestral and choral works, and two string quartets. His second quartet, composed in 1944, won him a blessing from New York critics, a National Institute of Arts and Letters grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a job teaching composition at Manhattan's Juilliard School of Music.

Last week a CBS radio audience and a hall full of experts at Columbia University's Sixth Annual Festival of Contemporary American Music heard the first U.S. performance of California-born Composer

Bergsma's first full-sized symphony. In the program notes, he set about describing it in unabashed terms: "It is not a neoclassic work; the March is not that of Sousa, nor the Aria that of Bach . . . What the symphony is must be heard in the music. My basic aim was a direct, varied and purposeful musical expression. That is, of course, the aim of every honest composer."

What listeners heard from Conductor Izler Solomon and the CBS Symphony was honest and surprisingly modest music. As Composer Bergsma himself noted, it was "quite reasonably diatonic," i.e., based on traditional harmony. It also had a quiet, respectful, lyric feeling, expressed in almost Brahmsian lengths of line. It was purposeful and direct. If Symphony No. i fell short of any of its composer's professed aims, it was in its lack of variety, either harmonic or rhythmic. Even so, grinning Composer Bergsma, sitting in the audience with his young wife "Nickie " got a nice, appreciative hand of applause for a well-made and well-intentioned first symphony.

His next ambitious and unabashed proj ect: an opera about San Francisco, circa 1875. Says he: "I set words well, and I think I have a good enough dramatic sense to pull this off. If I don't, I'll find it out, and that's that."

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