Word: eisler
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...House Committee on Un-American Activities last week got around to Communist Gerhart Eisler's younger brother Hanns...
...kleigs as he listened to Committee Chief Investigator Robert Stripling describe him as "the Karl Marx of Communism in the field of music." Like Brother Gerhart, Hanns demanded the privilege of reading a statement to the committee. Chairman J. Parnell Thomas shouted an angry refusal. Thereupon, like Brother Gerhart, Eisler handed out typewritten copies of his statement to newsmen: "This hearing is both sinister and ridiculous. ... I would be delighted to spend as much time as this committee will allow to lecture on ... the art of the fugue. But . . . this committee has called me only in order to . . . smear...
...first few days, the committee seemed not particularly interested in bald, fat little Hanns Eisler. What seemed to interest it most was a long list of "certain prominent persons" who, it charged, had tried to help Eisler enter the U.S. The list sparkled with glittery names: Radio Commentator Raymond Swing, onetime Willkieman Russell Davenport, Hollywood Director William Dieterle, Columnist Dorothy Thompson and Eleanor Roosevelt...
Trash on High. Eisler denies that there is any such thing as a "history" of film music: "The person who around 1910 first conceived the repulsive idea of using the Bridal March from Lohengrin as an accompaniment is no more of a historical figure than any other secondhand dealer." Neither does he think that movie music is getting much better: "Progress has become perverted into calculating the audience's reactions, and the result is a combination of third-rate entertainment, maudlin sentimentality. ... It consists only in the fact that trash was taken out of its humble hiding place...
...student of famed Atonalist Arnold Schonberg, Eisler won Vienna's Academy of Music prize for composition in 1924. Among his U.S. film scores: The Woman on the Beach, Rain. He was exiled from Germany in 1933, is scheduled to testify about himself this week before the House Committee on Un-American Activities...