..."The White Election," a cycle of 32 songs on texts by Emily Dickinson, turned out to be a base hit, if not a home run. At first this outcome appeared unlikely. For one thing, the cycle is somewhat longer than either "Dichterliebe" or "Die Schoene Muellerin," in fact, so long that it constitutes a total program.

There seemed to be problems very early in the music's world premiere last night at the National Gallery. You couldn't call the first few songs amateurish exactly, but they seemed rather simple-minded for a classical program. The vocal lines often veered toward a sort of old-fashioned pop style. The music could have been composed at the same time as the poems--from 1858 to 1884--though some of it would have sounded a bit quirky then, like the poems, which themselves still sound a bit quirky.

The piano accompaniment was particularly strange. It showed a reluctance to use the full resources of the keyboard and little knowledge of harmony (or perhaps little interest in it). Most of the time, melodic fragments in the middle of the keyboard accompanied the soprano voice. Sometimes they did not seem very well coordinated with it. Occasionally, there were some ecclesiastical-sounding chords if they suited the mood of the words, or a melody that sounded like an echo of an old dance tune or a fragment of a children's song. But mostly, the piano seemed to be making a free-form comment on what the voice was doing. Until "I Should Not Dare to Leave My Friend" (1860), the last song in the first group and quite a good one, there was a certain sameness about the music.

All the poems in the second group were written in 1862; the Civil War is not exactly the subject, but it seems to loom in the background, and the rather sunny mood of the first group has become somber, preoccupied with death, loss and isolation. The music, too, changes; it becomes less disciplined, more expressive and, on the whole, considerably more interesting, certainly more varied. The interest continues and the variety grows throughout the rest of the cycle, though after one hearing the second section seems the best. One sees changes taking place, new possibilities opening up, a complex character portrait being formed by the words and music.

One does not usually go to the National Gallery early to read the program notes. Most of the time, there are none, except for the title and date of the composition. This time, however, there was a booklet--and when I finally had a chance to look through it, the composer's comments clarified what had been slowly dawning through the sequence of songs. Getty has tried to set the poems to music that Dickinson herself might have written. If he has not produced a masterpiece, he has developed a rather interesting idea.

Soprano Martha Steiger sang the cycle in a voice that was clear, accurate and usually sweet if not very rich in tone. Pianist Wendy Glaubitz tackled her rather unusual part intelligently.

An aria from Gordon Getty's ''Plump Jack'' was ill-served by its placement on the program: its slight charms seemed even slighter when wedged between Mahler and Bach. The aria is very simple, even rudimentary - little more than a series of accompanimental figures surrounding declamatory passages for the voice - but it is unpretentious, serves the cadence of Shakespeare's language faithfully, and is not without a certain appeal. Ben Holt sang with dapper style and careful enunciation.

At the center of Mignon Dunn's recital at Alice Tully Hall Thursday night were 18 songs from ''The White Election,'' Gordon Getty's setting of 32 Emily Dickinson poems. The cycle, as Mr. Getty's long and elaborate program notes tell us, is shaped in more or less biographical form and is intended to carry us through the spiritual progress of Emily Dickinson's uneventful, yet intensely felt, life in mid-19th-century America.

Mr. Getty has evidently responded to the laconic style of the poems; but while Emily Dickinson, the poet, has managed to compress great force into small spaces, Mr. Getty's settings are terse to the point of emptiness. There is, in other words, great deference to the text but hardly any music at all. What there is is expressed in popular 19th-century American harmonies, colored by occasional Schubertian devices and interrupted with a dissonant chord or two. Many of the songs avoid melody altogether and replace it with chanted text and single line accompaniments.... Thomas Fulton was the excellent pianist.

The concert served to introduce some new choral songs by Gordon Getty, who at his best stands honorably in the line of Frederick the Great, Prince Poniatowski and the other wealthy or titled amateurs who have turned their leisure to pleasant musical purpose. A predilection for monotonous rhythm (equal notes punctuated by holds on a single note) and for unison writing lends the choruses a chant-like quality at times, but elsewhere, Mr. Getty showed a sure feel for the shape of an effective vocal line.