Word: contrabass
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...sections comprising nearly 4,000 bars of music, with a performance time of more than two hours. By jazz standards, the forces required to perform it are almost Mahlerian: a 31-member band with full complements of brass and saxes, plus such normally nonswinging instruments as piccolo and contrabass clarinet. The work was played once in the composer's lifetime, but in a truncated form that left him despairing and furious. The score was put aside, abandoned...
...music began, the sound was a far cry from Sousa. Separated by staccato commentaries from the cathedral's pipe organ, densely dissonant sonorities clashed and blended over the listeners' heads. Full-throated blares, splintery muted phrases, the crooning tones of the soprano trombone, the rumble of its contrabass relative-all seemed to accelerate in a circular motion, spinning into the cathedral's 190-ft. cupola like an earthly echo of the music of the spheres...
Edgar Varese's Octandre (1924), one of the two modern works, did not compare favorably with Stravinsky's pivotal Movements for Piano and Orchestra (1959), with Harvard's Luise Vosgerchian as soloist. Octandre, for seven winds and contrabass, seemed individual but not highly original, consisting of some explorations of the percussive possibilities of wind articulation, propulsive rhythms, and generally uninteresting timbres. The piece seems much less provocative than the contemporary experiments of Hindemith, Bartok, Schoenberg, and Cowell. The Movements, however, a strictly twelve-tone piece, is characterized by pellucid, crystalline registration, pointillistic rhythmical control, and Stravinsky's unique unsentimental lvricism...
...finest singing. The mezzosoprano and soprano, Jan Curtis and Susan Stevens, sounded totally alien, much as if one were simultaneously listening to a barrel-organ and a celeste. The choir was improperly overbalanced by the women, except in the Gloria, who smiled eloquently but sang somewhat carelessly. The contrabass continuo was consistently too loud and intermittently coarse...
...comeback of the recorder has been stimulated by the resurgence of interest in baroque music. More than that, the instrument has several appealing points. It is inexpensive, ranging from $3 to $10 for popular home models, up to $700 for a seven-foot professional contrabass that resembles an anti tank weapon. It is easy on the neighbors, and playing it, as Hamlet observed, "is as easy as lying...