Word: bombastics
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Second Sonata is an amazing piece of music. Subtitled "Concord, Mass., 1840-1860," its four movements are labelled, respectively, "Emerson," "Hawthrone." "The Alcotts," and "Thoreau." In "Hawthorne" Ives unleashes all his powers of satire as he incorporates Debussy-like ragtime, fragments of Protestant hymns, and purposely misharmonized American bombast -- "Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean," for example--into an acid brew that recalls the "This Scherzo Is a Joke" movement of the Piano Trio. Mendelssohn and the Beethoven Fifth make their appearance in "The Alcotts," a merciless parody of all the cliches of nineteenth-century musical sentimentality. Of the four...
...work is to poke mild fun at the bombast of the rules, and to highlight their potential absurdity," explains composer Robert Levin...
...said, "but he could be compared with Squire Western, or Mr. Micawber, or Lucien de Rubempre." The posthumous publication of parts of his own remarkable million-word Journal, moreover, only added to the popular caricature of him as a fop, a snob, and a frightened little poseur hiding behind bombast and a vulgar cocksureness...
MAHLER: SYMPHONY NO. 4 (Columbia). This glorious work contains Mahler's song "Das himmlische Leben," and George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra recreate the Teutonic paradise. Judith Raskin, who sings the three soprano solos, sounds warm and free, yet her precise technique never allows a hint of bombast. "St. Cecilia with all her relatives are the excellent court musicians," goes the final refrain of the song, and the Cleveland and Miss Raskin could not be better described...
...Grubb was unable to keep such anguished hyperbole confined to his journal. It gushes throughout the book, which is about the lynch-murder of a Negro boy in a small Southern town. At its best, Grubb's imagery is impressive and his prose is lyrical. But his uncontrolled bombast, his near-hysterical characters, and his determination to leave no grit unhominized often make the cliché-ridden novel read like a bad parody...