Time Magazine

MUSIC

FOLK SINGERS the Studio has become a shrine that wins the affectionate services of such For the Love of It stars as Odetta, Bob Dylan and Pete "There ain't no place around this Seeger when they pass through town. holy town where a fella can get all them Bradley still has trouble explaining the devils out of his throat," the expatriate source of his ambition. He gets a "re- folk singer complained -- and he was truing" sense from folk songs, he says. right: for all its glories, Rome had no But his success can be stated simply: for nightclub for folk singers. Such a cul both audience and performers, the Stu tural omission might have been easily dio offers the pleasure of making music endurable, but when an American Ne for the love of it. gro painter named Harold Bradley opened his II Folk Studio two years ago, Rome greeted it like springtime. ORATORIOS Since then, the Studio has become a The Meaning of the Rats genuine academy of folk-loric song and The narrator's voice is cold. Thou is fast becoming the most popular club sands of rats, he says, have come from in the city. Last week, noting the Stu the cellars and sewers to die in the city's dio's importance to the musical life of streets. The plague has begun. The dead Rome, the Italian government even will be carried away in tramcars. There COMPOSER GERHARD promised Bradley a subsidy. is a panicked whisper of running feet, Chilling, but profound. The Studio's polyglot performers a scream, a distant moan. The chorus is turn the dim basement room into a Cel a clamor of wails -- "the rats, the rats." storm of inventiveness, and Gerhard, lar of Babel. Tennessee banjo pickers Trombones trail down the declining 67, proved himself to be a resourceful and American Negro folk singers take moan of an air-raid siren, and the or composer. Violin bows drawn across their turns with such musicians as a chestra shrieks in echoed despair. In a cymbals' edges make their pale, tor Sudanese oud player and a Japanese long, fatal moment, the music dies on tured protest as they create an eerie, painter who sings improvised melodies the slowly fading tremor of a gong. And shimmering climate of fear. A nail file to verses from Confucius. One night's in that long moment last week, a hushed raked across piano strings evokes wind program may include everything from audience at London's Royal Festival against telegraph wires. The murmur a down-home treatment of Ballin' the Hall perceived the chilling profundity and patter of the rats in the streets is Jack to a Yugoslavian dirge, and there is of Roberto Gerhard's The Plague, an sounded by cellists tapping clamped even one Italian folk singer whose songs oratorio of terror based on the novel strings. are collected in the best ethnic tradition by Albert Camus. Such stunts were scarcely noticed -- from peasants, workmen, and lifers Climate of Fear. Gerhard (TiME, beneath the spell cast by the premiere. in an open-air prison in Sardinia. Jan. 18, 1963) approached the novel With Dorati conducting the BBC Sym Bradley, a 33-year-old former full almost piously, and his libretto lost lit phony and Chorus and Actor Stephen back for the Cleveland Browns, offers tle of the power of Camus' bitter wis Murray narrating the dark libretto, his audience as few comforts as possi dom: as in the novel, the rats may be Gerhard's difficult music got the intense ble. The Studio serves only hot wine real, but the plague is only a shadow of performance it requires and deserves. and popcorn, and the customers are the greater horrors man makes for him The audience -- having held its emo crowded unmercifully into a room self. "The plague," said Conductor An- tional breath for 40 minutes -- re scarcely larger than a pool table. The tal Dorati, "is all diseases of the mind, sponded with a sustained ovation. boss pays his performers only food and every dictatorship, every war, and there A Shutter's Creak. The Plague is carfare, and the constantly changing is no real freedom as long as there are neither as sustained nor complex as program denies them even the salve pestilences. The rats may come again Benjamin Britten's War Requiem, but of star billing. To pure folk singers, to the happy city. This is the message." it invites comparison to that modern though, the problems are minor, and Making the point in music required a masterwork in its personal comment on a desperate universal theme. A Spanish exile who lives in near hermitry outside Cambridge, Gerhard spent more than a year fashioning his brilliantly distilled- libretto from Stuart Gilbert's transla tion of the novel, then found the music for his words in six more months. The score has only the merest wisps of melody, but the music achieves some deeply stirring and unnerving moments -- as when an orchestral whimper mim ics the creak of a shutter in an empty street. Gerhard's affinity for Camus first led him to consider writing an opera based on the late French author's bleak first novel, The Stranger, and he still plans to do the work -- if he can win a commis sion. But while lying ill two years ago, the musical approach to the message of The Plague struck him. "It is man's bestiality to man, and the pestilence is the fight against terror." That message, SPRINGTIME AT IL FOLK STUDIO he says, "took my imagination by Crowded, but deeply retruing. storm."