Word: bache
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There isn't much that a small African country can do nowadays to call attention to its cultural sophistication, but almost any attempt deserves applause. This month the Republic of Togo is issuing a series of postage stamps bearing the likenesses of Bach, Beethoven, Debussy and a composer named Edward Kennedy Ellington. It is all very flattering to the Duke, but it would be a mistake for the people of Togo-or anywhere else-to think that this honor stamps him as a classic of the past. If anything, the Duke, at 67, is writing more jazz and writing...
Tuesday, April 11 SPECIAL−DICK VAN DYKE (CBS, 8:30-9:30 p.m.). In his first comedy-variety special, Dick Van Dyke ranges the musical scale from Margie to Bach, assisted by guest star, Phil Erickson...
Charles Ives--Yale man, insurance salesman, transcendentalist, composer--surely one of the most unusual figures in the history of music. Danbury Conn. was his musical matrix. In the solid German academic tradition, he was steeped in Handel, Bach, and Beethoven, as well as in the Puritan and Victorian hymns, minstrel tunes, and "sentimental drawing-room ballads" of late nineteenth-century America. Yet Ives was a composer far ahead of his time, employing radical devices such as polytonality, metrical modulation and tone clusters long before they appeared in the European musical spotlight...
This vear's Bach Society failed to live up to the expectation of authenticity which it aroused. Though classical in terms of instrumental forces, it played the Beethoven with a Romantic concept of dynamics. Instead of a long crescendo, the development of the first movement was a wearingly consistent fortissimo. In the second movement, the wind-string balance was totally off, reaffirming the traditional inability of Harvard winds to play softly. Even considering the conservative tempo of the last movement, the orchestra's struggling with the notes is forgiveable; but its loudness and dullness...
That program was designed to take advantage of the orchestra's size, but it also tended to expose the orchestra's weaknesses and shortcomings. Had Hathaway been more sensitive to the real potential of his orchestra, there might have been some fine results. As it was, the Bach society's performance--energetic, amateurish, on top of the music as much as laboring under its weight--was Harvard music at its most typical, if not at its best...