Word: baton
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...come on, and the customers shoulder their way to the door, hands burning and hearts still tingling with a rediscovery of a bygone Fourth of July-a time when the franks were fat and hot and the firecrackers spat showers of sparks and the drum major's spinning baton flashed in the sun, and the grass in the park felt as soft as corn silk underfoot. Since opening night last Dec. 19, every audience has reacted in this same wholehearted way to The Music Man, Broadway's biggest musical...
Home for a festive Iowa wingding was Composer Meredith (The Music Man) Willson, who jovially greeted some 20,000 of the Mason City homefolks, grabbed a baton and proudly led a 208-piece band (with, naturally, 76 trombones and no cornets) down the main street, later uncorked lus ire at rock 'n' roll: "It's a plague as far-reaching as any plague we've aver had. My preoccupation with this creeping paralysis is not with the lascivious quality, the suggestive dancing that goes with it. This is bad, and it's been condemned before...
...playing of the orchestra, and we are surprised they can play all the notes, but we would rather listen to the music of Mendelssohn." The young man on the podium flushed, resumed at a slower tempo. Hour after hour, it went on that way last week while 19 fledgling baton wavers flailed away under Steinberg's watchful eye through Liverpool's international competition for conductors...
...demolished your authority entirely, right in front of the orchestra." Most frequently. Steinberg jumped on the contestants for exaggerated gestures. When he spotted a shoulder-to-waist stroke, he would inquire acidly: "Are you a windmill?" Contestants soon learned that a 3-in. flick of the baton before the sensitive Liverpool Philharmonic could do the work of a 2-ft. stroke with less finely tuned orchestras...
...outlines, Reiner offered a lyrically transparent reading in which every phrase stood out as though etched with scalpel. The tempi were firm as bedrock, the contrasts brilliantly modulated. In both Philadelphia and Carnegie Hall, where he repeated the program, Reiner ticked off the beat with tiny flicks of his baton. To his audiences he revealed sculptured details that many had never heard before...