Word: 20th
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...BartÓk was an orphan of the 20th century. NagyszentmiklÓs, the Hungarian town in which he was born a century ago, was ceded to Rumania in 1920. Nagyszöllös, where he wrote his first compositions at the age of nine, is now part of the Soviet Union. Pozsony, where he spent his teen-age years, has become Bratislava, Czechoslovakia. He died of leukemia in New York City in 1945, a refugee from the war, living at the end in a cramped apartment on West 57th Street...
...dense, intricate writing challenged the minds, ears and fingers of string players and set a new standard of formal complexity that opened the way for such works as the quartets of Elliott Carter. The Mikrokosmos, 153 short piano studies of increasing difficulty, is an indispensable introduction to 20th century compositional and pianistic techniques...
...reputation, however, has grown steadily. The reason is not hard to find. Despite a sometimes highly dissonant and rhythmically spiky style, his music has a strong, direct appeal. As Musicologist Mosco Garner has observed: "Of the three musicians who dominated the musical scene during the first half of the 20th century-Stravinsky, Schoenberg and BartÓk-it is the Hungarian master who, despite his intellectual control, remained the nearest to the instinctual, the irrational in music, and thus to the Dionysian spirit...
Ralph Bakshi dreams big. Turning Fritz the Cat (1972) and The Lord of the Rings (1978) into animated features posed insufficient challenge to a man who contains Whitmanesque multitudes. Now he would tell, in an hour and a half of cartoons, the story of 20th century America and its popular music. American Pop would be a nipper version of Disney's Fantasia, and something more: a dirge for lost patriarchy, for the sermons and sins of fathers everywhere, personified by four generations of American pops. One father would die in a tsarist pogrom; the next would become a friend...
...players in the group finish other freelance jobs. "The demands," Oppens admits, "are absolutely grueling." Carter observes that "it is hard to keep such an organization going. Each year is a struggle." Struggle or not, Speculum's sights are still set high. Says Blackwell: "We want to play 20th century music better than any other group...