Critical Composer

You know who critics are?--the men who have failed in literature and art.

--Disraeli

New York City's newspapers and magazines support some 40 regular music critics. Their main job is to keep tabs on the city's 1,500-odd concerts, operas and recitals each season. Most of them are journalists first & last, though many are amateur pianists. But, now & then, a scant half dozen expose themselves to brotherly blasts as active composers.

Last week the Herald Tribune's shy, scholarly Critic Arthur Berger, 40, took his biggest leap: his Ideas of Order, a twelve-minute orchestral piece inspired by poems of Wallace Stevens, got its premiere from the Philharmonic-Symphony, conducted by Dimitri Mitropoulos. The music had Stravinsky-like touches: nervous rhythms, clean, cool sonorities, a three-note theme scattered among instruments and pitch levels. But, in the richness of sound and in the three brief but searing climaxes, it was clear that Berger had a style of his own.

A Rumble of Principles. The audience applauded warmly, and the critics nodded fraternally. "Purely esthetic, absolutely logical," wrote Noel Straus of the Times. "As simple and charming as a Haydn symphony," said the Herald Tribune's Jay S. Harrison. "A composer with principles," rumbled the Journal-American's Miles Kastendieck.

Berger, Bronx-born, began improvising at the piano when he was ten, and once thought of a performer's career. But he was supporting himself as a music critic and ghostwriter by the time he was 20. In the early '30s, he covered modernist concerts for the tabloid Mirror while the more austere dailies were filling their columns with Rachmaninoff. Except for spells of teaching (at Mills and Brooklyn Colleges) and study (with Darius Milhaud and Nadia Boulanger), he has been at it ever since, is now the Herald Trib's most influential critic next to Critic-Composer (Four Saints in Three Acts) Virgil Thomson. On his days off, he has found time to compose a score of scores of his own.

Aside from the fact that it pays him a good living, criticism appeals to Berger. He finds that his experience as a composer helps him understand the problems of performing--and the need for first-rate performances. But, in the course of covering five events a week, he has his headaches. One is the overloaded program (morning-paper critics like to get back to their office typewriters early). Another, and the commonest source of distress to a sympathetic critic: the struggling but limited performer who has laid out a hard-earned $1,000-$1,500 for a Manhattan recital, hoping for rave reviews which will lead to contracts and a steady career. An Hour Till Midnight. Critic Berger has about an hour in which to set his opinions on paper before his midnight deadline, flows them out quickly. As a composer, Berger takes more time, usually spends several painstaking months on a quarter hour of music (Ideas took about 90 days). Even after it is technically finished, Berger often continues to polish up details. Says he: "I am my own severest critic."

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