Word: constantly
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Pity the poor skier who faces life without that sense of inevitability, without knowing whether or not there will be a ski team next year. The constant terror of non-existence is ever before...
...Marius Constant is a fast-rising 33-year-old Parisian composer with a peculiar aural defect: he can never listen to a single instrument without mentally hearing all the instruments of the orchestra. This gets so bad, he complains, that "even when I play the piano all by myself, I hear strings and trombones, trumpets and percussion.'' Not long ago Composer Constant also found himself hearing tom-toms, marimbas, vibraphone and celesta. He committed these exotic cerebral sounds to paper, and last week a Parisian audience jammed into the Theatre des Champs-Elysées to hear...
...performed by Bernstein and his beefed-up 112-man orchestra. Constant's starkly atonal 24 Preludes lasted a scant 13 minutes. They were played without pauses, ranged in mood from misty delicacy to raucous riots of sound. One prelude, which Boxing Fan Constant called "The Punch." had a hard. loud, opaque sound, lasted for all of six seconds. In another, the musicians found themselves playing 56 parts simultaneously. At concert's end the audience shrieked and bravoed. the critics registered approval, and Conductor Bernstein acknowledged that he found the whole business "interesting'' and "searching...
...Composer Constant's greatest fear is that he might "stay on the road along which everything has already been said.'' In an effort to avoid that fate, he has produced such bizarre works as High Voltage, a ballet that features a flashing pylon on the stage. The Flute Player, which tells the story of the Pied Piper against a tape of a children's chorus played at double speed. Three years ago his opera Imagery of Saint-Michel created a scandal in Venice, chiefly because the action takes place in a prizefight ring, with Archangel Michael...
Over the years. Constant has come to believe that brevity is the soul of musical wit. "In fifty or a hundred years,'' he says, "the symphonies of Beethoven and even Honegger will seem like endless repetitions." How does he feel about his own work? "I was born," says Constant, "under the sign of Aquarius. Far be it from me to suggest a comparison, but it was Mozart's sign...