Word: counterpoint
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...feeling. But the delicate subtlety of this group were not sufficient preparation for the Hindemith and Copland with which the program closed. Although they fitted in far better than would any Classical or Romantic music, several of the Hindemith songs were spent adjusting the audience to modern dissonance and counterpoint. In the last selection, Copland's pictorial "Lark," Paul Tibbetts' magnificent baritone solo reaffirmed the eloquence and competence of the group's first rate performance...
...uncle, with whom he lived as a schoolboy, was a dealer in musical instruments. Before long, Adrian had secretly mastered the keyboard, discovered double counterpoint on his own and become the apple of the local music teacher's eye. Author Mann, who played the violin as a boy, held long conversations with his friends Igor Stravinsky and Bruno Walter as "research" for Faustus, and has packed his book with an impressive and at times annoying display of musical knowledge that will be over the heads of most readers...
Though Stravinsky went Bachwards, it is doubtful whether Johann Sebastian would recognize, or relish, the result. For Stravinsky does not write antiquarian music : he ruffles the calm of his counterpoint with eruptive rhythm and dissonance. It was not the kind of music to excite the Stravinsky cult that had cheered Petrouchka and The Rite of Spring; and it became fashionable in the '20s to say that the fire in the Stravinsky furnace burned out before World War I. It is not so fashionable to say that now: in recent years even some hostile critics concede that Stravinsky...
With "H.M.S. Pinafore" Gilbert and Sullivan gained their first great popular success, and in their next work they bathed themselves in their new-found virtuosity. Gilbert began to write profounder satire and at the same time became more ambitious in his lyrics, while Sullivan indulged in counterpoint and harmony as he grew more adept at tossing off melodies. "The Pirates of Penzance" was almost as successful as its predecessor, although it dealt with such abstractions as "duty," and had no characters to compare with Buttercup or Sir Joseph Porter K.C.B...
Actually, Piston's Third was less strident and mechanized than most of the music he has written in the past 20 years. Hostile critics have found his music as bony and bare as a blackboard counterpoint exercise in his Harvard classroom. But the Third had three movements of lyrical tranquillity before bursting into a noisy finale. The finale, said Piston, was written in Vermont while a well-driller was digging an artesian well outside his window. "I had to write the music loud enough to overcome the noise outside," said Piston...