Who needs Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon when we have One Degree of Pomona College?

Celebrity watchers can keep their "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon." To connect modern music's disparate dots, music lovers need only play "One Degree of Pomona College."

Pomona, for example, may offer the shortest line between father of 20th century modernism Igor Stravinsky and Mother of Invention Frank Zappa. Stravinsky was a guest on campus in 1956 when Professor of Music William F. Russell invited him to rehearse and conduct the Pomona College Chorus in the composer's own Les Noces. Less than a decade later, a young and then unknown Zappa petitioned Russell's colleague and dear friend Karl Kohn to let him sit in on one of Kohn's 20th-century theory classes.

Zappa would next surface in 1966 with Freak Out!, his opening salvo and a record still noted for its daring juxtaposition of rock 'n' roll and Stravinsky-inspired, avant-garde experimentation. (The album's liner notes list both Stravinsky and Kohn as influences.) The connection may be coincidence, but it's no accident that Pomona still enjoys its reputations for the performance and preservation of modern, often challenging music.

David Noon '68, dean of the Manhattan School of Music, explains the origins of Pomona College's ongoing embrace of cutting-edge, often adventurous music with two words: "Russell and Kohn. When they came to Pomona from the East Coast in the 1950s, they brought with them a thorough knowledge of the old and a sensitivity to the new that truly made the College blossom."

That sensitivity to the new led both professors to become deeply involved in Los Angeles' burgeoning new-music scene--especially the Monday Evening Concert series, where many of the world's leading modern and avant-garde composers debuted work. Russell's VW bus trips into the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (host to many of the concerts) are still the stuff of Music Department legend. Kohn and wife Margaret would often play for the series, he served on the program's governing board and the series premiered several Kohn works.

"Those concerts," he recalls, "were one of the liveliest venues in the country for new music. Not just new music, but new music in the context of the past. It was mixed programming designed to enlighten. You could see Stravinsky sitting next to Aldous Huxley!"

You'd likely see Pomona students as well, and not just in the audience. The Glee Clubs performed on several occasions and featured solo soprano work from Lucy Shelton '65.

"The Monday Evening Concerts were extraordinarily important," says Shelton, who has since garnered international acclaim as a proponent of new and modern music. Shelton credits Russell, Kohn, Margery Briggs and the concerts for exposing her to a repertoire that remained hidden to many students in that day and for challenging her to meet its demands as a performer. "For my senior recital, I performed three of Karl's songs with him at the piano, as well as Berg, Milhaud, Britten and Mozart all accompanied by my voice teacher, Mrs. Briggs," she said. "That program would never have been approved at a conservatory! At Pomona, I could follow my heart."

Before long, many of the Monday Evening Concert composers and performers found their way to Pomona as well. Says Noon, "We were part of the bigger world even though we were living in Claremont because that bigger world was coming to us." Kohn adds, "Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luciano Berio and Henri Pousseur all gave lectures here in Bridges Hall. The standard honorarium was $25!"

Shelton recalls how the glow from such talent had a way of inspiring and empowering budding musicians. She recounts a performance by Berio and his wife Cathy Berberian, the premiere modern vocalist of her day: "I can remember Cathy coming on stage in Little Bridges. She was a very dramatic and elegant woman. She was to sing a capella, but she first went to the piano and gave herself a pitch. That's when I realized that she didn't have perfect pitch. I thought at the time, ÔI don't have perfect pitch either! Oh, I can do this!'"

--David Scott