Word: eighteenth
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...Germanic Museum will open its fourth season of free organ recitals on Tuesday evening, November 26th, at 8:15, with a concert by Ernest White, distinguished organists of the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, New York City. From a large repertory of seventeenth and eighteenth century music, Mr. White has chosen for his program works from rarely heard German and English composers, Handel and Bach, and the "Prelude, Fugue and Variation" by Cesar Franck...
...think you will not find this in a symphony like the Schubert Second, recorded this month by Howard Barlow and the Columbia Broadcasting Symphony. I think you will find that for all its charm the symphony is but a pale copy of eighteenth-century models. Perfectly constructed in every way, harmonically and melodically and rhythmically irreproachable, still it is patently thin. It lacks the emotional guts that made a Mozart E-flat or Haydn 99th great. In short, it succeeds only as a technical imitation. Compare another early Schubert symphony, the Fourth or "Tragic," with its eighteenth-century counterpart...
...Classical Symphony has received wide praise. To me it seems a weak-kneed, rather precious imitation of Haydn in modern harmonics. Probably it is somewhat satiric; still it is a good example of the failure of modern composers to recreate in twentieth-century dress the music of the eighteenth century. The spark which lit up the formal pattern of a classical symphony cannot be recaptured merely by reproducing the exteriors. Something else, whatever it is that makes any music great, must also be there...
...evidences a rather ill-defined approach to art in general. Great art, need it be said, is an outpouring of the most purified emotional and intellectual experiences of the artist. Anyone who would try to justify a work of art solely on its structural perfection would be like the eighteenth-century deist who tried to found religion on the mathematical, well-oiled precision of the universe. Depth and breadth of emotion are the stuff from which any art and any religion are made. In the highest art, intellectual discipline and logic must support this emotion, must cast it into permanent...
Which are: first, second, and third, lack of variety. There is too much nineteenth-century music played, and not enough seventeenth and eighteenth. There is too much repeating, even within this limited field, of a stock routine of standard works, not enough probing into minor musical literature. It is true, of course, that classical and pre-classical music exists largely in small forms, unfit for the symphony orchestra. But there are over a hundred symphonics by Haydn, suites from Bach, Telemann, and Handel. Why should we be forced to listen to ten performances of the Tchaikowski Pathetique for every...