Word: counterpoint
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Handel could incarnate his own unflagging vitality, his breadth of feeling wide as the open skies, his elemental strength, into the singers themselves, making them sing in sweeping comprehensive melodies and in intense close lines that make counterpoint quiver with life. Yet he had a perfect understanding of the capabilities and incapabilities of the singers, and never wrote beyond their capacities, so that the music never is unnatural or strained, as Beethoven so often is. Mozart, on the other hand, lacks Handel's great strength, though his delicate melodic line cannot be challenged...
...Crippen, a dentist celebrated for murdering his wife, cutting her body in pieces. But dapper, energetic Igor Stravinsky found himself the most influential composer of his generation. To younger composers the Sacre became music's Declaration of Independence. By 1920 nearly every musical youngling was throwing over his counterpoint for Stravinskian grunts & groans. To be caught in public with a pleasant tune was as embarrassing to a composer as to be caught without his pants. Every cacophony known to man was rooted out and set to music. Audiences shivered, but in vain...
...mere notch below his teacher. Said Pianist Paul ponderously: "[Boogie-woogie] is a kind of modern Bach, in so far as the left hand does not play a mere accompaniment but a distinct theme that is woven in with the theme of the right hand in a definite counterpoint style, with Bach-like improvisations on the themes...
...back into the cool comfort of the deep leather chair and listening to the four musicians, seated at one end of the intimate little room, playing the music he loved. He felt clean and invigorated when he heard the Bach which seemed like precise and classically perfect exercises in counterpoint. He smiled an inane smile of satisfaction and pleasure as the rich beauty of Beethoven filled his entire body with a feeling of quietly sensual pleasure. And being so extremely comfortable, he mused in a slow and comfortable manner...