Word: beethovens
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...music, whether as a cultural pursuit, political issue, spectator sport, historical tradition or simple daily pleasure. Other countries may name their streets after composers, but Austria must be the only place where a crack train is called the Mozart Express, and where the national airline has planes called Beethoven, Schubert and Bruckner. Even affairs of state become insignificant next to the true national passion; today, the directorship of the Vienna State Opera is a post scarcely less prestigious than the presidency of the Republic...
Throw Away the Script. His career lasted over half a century; by 1803, at 71, he was too weak to compose, but lingered on six more years to counsel such later hotbloods as the young Beethoven and Weber. For most of his life he was court composer to Prince Nicholas Esterházy, who obliged him to wear livery and dine at the servants' table, but who gave him every encouragement to tinker with accepted musical conventions and, when necessary, to kick them over. Haydn's musical life, in fact, stands as a direct contradiction...
...rhapsodic lyricism of the slow movement of Symphony No. 44 is far removed from the aloof, balanced expressiveness sought by most composers of his time; the demonic orchestral outbursts and sudden silences in the first movement of No. 80 point ahead to the struggle-locked manner of the later Beethoven. To initiate the finale of the Sinfonia Concertante, four solo instruments conduct a nonverbal argument among themselves, a passionate foreshadowing of the violent orchestral disputation in the finale of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony...
...punches the tape deck button for swing or symphony, and heads for the freeway. The six-lane concrete strip lets him proceed at 65 m.p.h. toward his office in town-except when there are so many other cars going the same way that he can listen to all of Beethoven's Ninth. By the time he gets to the office, his wife has already called-from the pink, push-button Princess extension in the kitchen-to ask him to stop by the shopping center on the way home and pick up the washing she is going to leave during...
...ancient, unusual Japanese instruments. Such traditional borrowings are his way of shaping what he scoops from his river of sound. Yet if the form still seemed elusive to the Philharmonic audience last week, that is apparently the way Takemitsu wants it. Not for him the lucid structure of a Beethoven Ninth Symphony. "It's a great architectural monument," he says, "but it's not my kind of music because it draws a distinction between man and nature. My music must represent efforts at becoming unified with nature. The composer's mission is to present sound...