Word: brooksian
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Brooks' different routines all fall into a coherent pattern. Each of the characters he assumes is a charlatan, a famous "celebrity" whose every move is dishonest and phony. Yet there is honesty in the dishonesty. The roles are forced on the Brooksian characters by their society; inevitably the "celebrities" haplessly reveal the hollow core beneath their moral and cultural pretensions. Their dogged ineptitude at falsifying themselves arouses our compassion rather than our distaste...
...Conductors. Besides being, with the exception of Walter's book on Mahler, the sole piece of intelligent prose published by a major American conductor on musical history or theory for the last ten years, it reveals Boston's Bayard as a keen historical analyst with broad-based Van-Wyck-Brooksian sympathies. This may seem like the introduction of strange standards, as if I were to attribute Joe Louis's technique to a knowledge of boxing history, and, in the case of a composer, it would be. A composer, after mastering the fundamentals, should be a law to himself, developing consistently...