Word: avant
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Greece's avant-garde composer Iannis Xenakis has a lofty artistic goal: to pre side over the marriage of 20th century science and music. "The two can no longer exist apart," he insists. "Musicians are being forced to recognize all kinds of technical advances. Their job is to catch up with them and guide them." This may be somewhat easier for Xenakis (whose full name is pronounced Yahn-nis Zen-nahk-ess) than for some of his peers. An accomplished architect, engineer and philosopher as well as a composer, he is enough at home with an IBM 7090 computer...
...Newsreel," composed of a non-chronological series of shots having no immediate relationship to each other, was produced by an avant-garde film company of the same name. One scene depicted a memorial service for Malcom X at a Harlem school; the next, a panel discussion in Newark of Harold Cruse's The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual...
...electronic synthesizer that bears his name -a 4-ft.-long contraption that looks like the control panel of a jet airliner with an organ keyboard grafted onto it-is by far the most effective device yet developed to produce electronic sounds. Besides serving as an "orchestra" for works by avant-garde composers, the Moog (rhymes with vogue) produced the bing-bong theme that for years preceded all CBS-TV color shows and the clarion call that heralds Westinghouse television commercials. The most spectacular application of the Moog to date is Composer Walter Carlos' electronic "orchestration" of ten Bach compositions...
...avant-garde campuses, where antimilitarism is now the prevailing style, ROTC students feel more socially out than ever. To compound their defensiveness, ROTC critics argue that the goals of the university and the military are antithetical. "The university seeks to promote democracy and equality and above all to prize independence of mind and judgment," says James R. Anderson, 29, a humanities instructor at Michigan State University, who spent two years in Army ROTC when he was an undergraduate. "The military," says Anderson, "stresses hierarchy, the solution to problems through violence rather than reason, and unquestioning obedience to commands from above...
...confirm Céline's status as an important college-cult figure. Castle to Castle may mark wider recognition in the U.S. for Céline as one of the considerable writers of this century. Yet Céline's belief that he was in the esthetic avant-garde is overblown, and so are the claims that this book is a germinal literary event. Celine said that he wrote the way people talk and evidently regarded this as a startling innovation. It may be considered a departure only by comparison with the preposterous presumption of the 1930s, when...