Word: baton
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...hall at the John F. Kennedy Center. A cheerful cherub of a man walked swiftly to the podium and smiled at the audience. His face was a pale Russian winter's landscape, his blue eyes shone mischievously. He turned toward his colleagues and, with a sturdy slash of his baton, launched into a high-speed, raucous overture that seemed to roil the Potomac. It was strictly show-biz razzmatazz, a pastiche stitched together by Leonard Bernstein from his 1976 musical 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The show had not fared well on Broadway, and the music culled from it might have passed...
...Beethoven, Indian sitar music to music of the Renaissance, the Vienna Boys Choir to the Olympia Brass Band of New Orleans. In subsequent episodes, the series settles down to explore the major elements of music: rhythm, melody, harmony, style. Sidlin provides comic relief as, at a flick of his baton, he changes from conductor to the Melody Doctor or to the loudmouthed host of What's That Rhythm?, a talk-show parody. Each program ends on an upbeat, with excerpts from such masterpieces as Sibelius' Finlandia and Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition...
...instinct surfaced steadily and surely. To Stokowski the sound an orchestra produced and the reaction it drew from an audience were more important than anything else in a concert. If this necessitated a breach in propriety or break from formal performance practice, he sanctioned it. Stokowski conducted without a baton, and partly because of that was considered one of the most difficult conductors to follow. He relied in its stead upon subtle gestures and facial expressions to produce the desired results. Stokowski allowed himself to get carried away by the music, thrilling lay audiences but offending purists who preferred...
Basketball Star Calvin Murphy doesn't wear spangled tutus, but he twirls a mean baton. "I was bullied into it," says the Houston Rockets' guard. "All six of my mother's sisters were twirlers, and they thought it was the thing for me to do." Murphy, 29, began twirling when he was five and later performed with his home-town high school band in Norwalk, Conn. "There was some teasing, but I wasn't bothered much," he says. According to Murphy, "baton twirling is harder than basketball. Con- centration is the key word and you have...
Vito A. dementi Baton Rouge...