Word: canticum
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...alfalfa-flavored chamber music. A notable and daring exception has been New York's Empire State Music Festival, which five years ago pledged itself to new or rarely performed works. In a sprawling tent at Ellenville, N.Y., the festival presented the Eastern premiere of Stravinsky's Canticum Sacrum, the premiere of a ballet by Villa-Lottos, Sibelius' music for The Tempest and Strauss's Elektra, Carl Orff's score for Midsummer Night's Dream. But the festival was dogged by bad luck and bad weather, last summer had to close up shop in midseason...
...Future. In his present style (Canticum Sacrum, In Memoriam Dylan Thomas), Stravinsky is experimenting with the serial or tone row technique of Arnold Schoenberg (see below), whom he once regarded as the leader of an alien musical camp. Said protean Igor Stravinsky on his 75th birthday: "I simply cannot do without a tonal row, and have come more and more to feel that it is 'the way of the future...
...earlier years (e.g., Stravinsky's own 1951 Rake's Progress, Britten's 1954 Turn of the Screw, Prokofiev's 1955 Flaming Angel), pinned all their hopes and a large part of their remaining budget on the world premiére of Stravinsky's Canticum Sacrum ad Honorem Sancti Marci Nominis (Canticle to Honor the Name of St. Mark...
...rumored fee of $12,000. (A member of the Russian Orthodox faith, Stravinsky is very religious, but rarely goes to church in Los Angeles, where he lives, because "the singing is something terrible.") After struggling with the assignment, he turned up not with a Passion but with his Canticum-and it took a mere 17 minutes to perform. When officials protested, he replied that he could have made it longer, but it would have been no better. If they wanted more music, play it again. And that is just the way it happened...