Music

We're not sure about its once-touted ability to "soothe a savage breast," but the evidence is slowly piling up that music - anything from Ravel to reggae, depending on the listener's taste - is starting to play at least a modest role in modern medicine. Not a new concept, to be sure - the idea that music has healing powers goes back to the Old Testament. And in modern times, a plethora of studies has shown that music alleviates pain and anxiety in patients and can even be used as an adjunct to therapy for such illnesses as Alzheimer's, depression and dementia.

When the Hildegard Chamber Players perform, their concerts reveal only the tip of a fin of the great body of research and publication in women's music that sweeps on beneath them. The ensemble returns Sunday at the Free Library to play the second of its four-concert series, offering works that are part of recent publications and editions under preparation at Hildegard's home base in Wynnewood. There, Sylvia Glickman - pianist, composer, publisher and passionate promoter of music by women composers - oversees an international search for manuscripts and incipits to place in the 12-volume anthology of women's music she is preparing.

Well, they're doing it again. They're trying to match up a pinch of Vivaldi, a teaspoon of Mozart and some finely chopped Puccini with turkey roulade, bran muffins and persimmon freeze. They guarantee you that it will add a trendy but unobtrusive element to your supper. Tra-la-la. They have put it on cassettes - packaging recipes and recitals. Hey - it's almost a new millenium. The truly whole person needs a few carefully chosen symphonic themes blended into the papaya puree and low-cal tarragon vinaigrette.

The singers have done Gregorian chants, and early American choral pieces, Hanukah pieces and works for Epiphany, but despite their varied repertoire, nothing prepared the members of Voces Novae Et Antiquae choral ensemble for the concert they'll perform Sunday at Haverford College. "Native Visions" will premiere the work of several contemporary Native Americans written in the style of their native traditions. A similar collection of work in the native tradition has never been tried in the Philadelphia area.

This weekend's Painted Bride concerts by Rel?che, in collaboration with Group Motion Dance Co., were given a music-only preview at the neo-industrial Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts in Wilmington's sprawling, charmless waterfront cultural complex. Absent the visual stimuli of dancers, the onus was squarely on the music and its ability to create motion, if only in the mind. Composer Paul Epstein, a veteran Rel?che collaborator, provided two works in which the "dancing" was more intellectual than physical.

Those who bought IBM at 10, were in South America when Halley's comet reappeared and sit exactly where the home-run ball will fall are also those who have been passing up Philadelphia Orchestra concerts that immediately follow Riccardo Muti's departure from the series. It is obvious that a period of adjustment follows his leaving, and last night's concert was studded with faulty adjustments. Rafael Fruhbeck de Burgos was on the podium to lead a program of music by Ravel, Lalo, Bartok and Blacher.

Up With People, a group of more than 100 young people from throughout the world, will present a show of international music and dance titled "Time for the Music" at 7:30 p.m. Saturday at Pennsauken High School on Hylton Road. The group's appearance is being sponsored by the township government, and promoted by "Up With Pennsauken," a local organization that seeks to promote residents' pride in the community. Up With People is an "upbeat musical variety . . . (group) that shows young people interacting in a positive way," said John Willis, a group member.

The Philadelphia Orchestra's student concerts often break ground one way or another. Conductor William Smith assumes that his listeners are open for any musical experience, and he has a knack for finding ever more examples for them. Last night, his soloist at the Academy of Music was bass trombonist Blair Bollinger, playing this season as a substitute member of the orchestra but who earned this solo appearance through audition while still a student. Bollinger's instrument rarely has a solo role, and more often than not seems like the stolid circus acrobat who carries the whole pyramid of siblings on his shoulders.

Stuart Hudgins, a 41-year-old graphic designer from Baltimore, has for 17 years been collecting "long-neglected" films featuring influential black musicians, and Mellon PSFS festivalgoers will be among the first to enjoy the fruits of his labors this weekend at a special family program. Hudgins' "Cartoons That Swing," a 45-minute film treat, will have two free showings Sunday at the McCall School. Five Betty Boop cartoons produced by the Fleischer Studios in the 1930s will be shown, including the Cab Calloway number "Minnie the Moocher," in which Calloway turns into a singing walrus, and a Louis Armstrong rendition of "I'll Be Glad When You're Dead, You Rascal You. " These cartoons illustrate the use of a device called a rotoscope, which projected live action, one frame at a time, onto a surface so the animator could duplicate the complicated movements of the live performer in the cartoon character.

If you know the music of Isaac Albeniz, Enrique Granados or Manuel de Falla, it's easy to think you know the music of Spain. Mournful tunes, insistent dances, castanets and guitars. Strikingly colored and crafted, undeniably nationalistic, it is music that often belies its composition in this century. Yet a modernist sensibility is alive in Iberia. Luis de Pablo and Cristobal Halffter are its best-known representatives, members of the international avant-garde that includes Hungary's Gyorgy Ligeti and West Germany's Hans Werner Henze.