Word: abstractions
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Beethoven was the first composer to make use of ugly sounds in abstract music, the first to make notes speak in everyday prose, to stamp and rave, and stand still to make philosophical statements, and Pianist Schnabel was temperamentally capable of bringing all of these qualities into line with Beethoven's more appealing side. Beethoven was also the first composer to become a bourgeois hero and one of the first upon whom the stupefying epithet "great" was popularly bestowed, an event that forecast the beginning of the present sorry condition of concert music-during the last hundred years...
...like their contemporaries elsewhere, most of the younger British painters seem determined to buck all tradition. Veering off on new courses of their own, they plainly show the influence of U.S. abstract expressionists, rated by British critics as a visual equivalent of rock 'n' roll. Prime example is Painter William Scott, 43, now having his first one-man show in Manhattan at the Martha Jackson Gallery. Scott's ominous saucepans owe something to the slick stick school of France's Bernard Buffet (TIME, Feb. 27), just as his segmented, all-red nudes do to Jean Dubuffet...
There are many reasons for indulging one's time and energy in pure, abstract speculation. As Batteau points out, professional scientific papers have no raw, unfinished ideas. They contain no wild flights of imagination, no daring expeditions into the trackless and lush jungles of scientific possibility. There must be outlets for pure speculative activity--and that is the raison d'etre behind the Society. "Bull sessions and science fiction are market places for half-baked ideas," explains Batteau...
Fantasia is an experiment in translating classical music onto the screen through abstract and cartoon animation. When first shown in 1940, Walt Disney's most imaginative work was frustrated at the box office. Since Hollywood has never since dared a similar experiment, the film remains an original and fresh experience for the moviegoer...
...musical gourmet, the film may at times be irritating. When Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony is translated into a delightful mythological Bacchanalia, the music is lost. And when the Nutcracker Suite lends background music for a series of abstract and animated dances, the naturally light music is often rearranged into a rather insipid effervescence...