Word: beethovens
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...Dice Music. Attributed to Mozart, who liked a joke as much as anyone else, Dice Music consists of a waltz theme and a set of variations that are determined in a Cage-like manner, by rolling dice. In Hpschd, Cage embroidered the variations with snippets from works by Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, Gottschalk, Busoni-even Cage. Each player had seven 20-minute chunks of music to choose from. Once having played, he was free to chat for a while with the listeners (who were given fluorescent plastic overalls to wear), then play the same chunk over again, or launch into another...
Time for Composing. As for Bernstein, he flies off this week to conduct Beethoven's Missa Solemnis for the 100th anniversary of the Vienna State Opera, "and that will be the end of my conducting until 1970." The new time found will be for composing. He will confer with Italian Director Franco Zeffirelli about a joint project - "almost a sort of filmed opera" - and he has a commission to do a musical theater work for the opening of Washington's Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in the fall...
This illustrates vividly, I think, your Essay's point that "white-oriented courses more or less ignore Negro contributions to American history and culture," that they constitute "whitewashed education." There is no discrimination against the black student who wants to play Beethoven concertos or sing opera. But for instruction in jazz or rhythm-and-blues -nothing doing! That this discrimination is cultural rather than racial is demonstrated by the fact that the young white jazz musician is no better...
From Weber, who thought Beethoven ripe for the madhouse for spreading a dozen notes over five minutes in the opening of his Fourth Symphony; to Schoenberg, trying to convince Mahler that a melody could be produced by passing one note around among several instruments' to Cage, who celebrates the esthetic of the suggestive-mundane, music has been a dynamo house, even if it seems lethargic from the outside. Musical history seems like a cycle of vituperation and eulogy. At the present time the vituperation is peculiarly stubborn and the eulogy almost theocratic. We see the spectacle of older people grappling...
...bewildered the public, as the years from 1882 to 1935 -- years of almost constant musical detonations. The main crisis was that the girdling shadow of the colossus Wagner had to be escaped. The entire community of Europe agonied in the punishing ascendency of the magnificent nineteenth century figures: Beethoven, Wagner, Brahms, Metternich, Bismarck, Darwin. Music was caught in a vortex of gigantic, lavish attempts at the final romantic masterpiece. Mahler's Eighth Symphony, Richard Strauss's Symphonia Domestica and Alpine Symphony, Schoenberg's Pelleas and Melisande and Gurre-Lieder, Scriabin's Poem of Ecstasy were all part of an increasingly...