Word: ended
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Last week in Japan, at the end of its tour, the Little Orchestra played still another Cowell gift to the Orient: a two-movement piece with a "Japanese feel" titled Ongaku. Strongly flavored with the haunting sonorities of early Japanese court music, Ongaku was a success with the older members of the audience, but left some of the younger ones, whose musical diet is increasingly Western, faintly puzzled. Said one: "Frankly, it's too Japanese for us; it's a bit over our heads...
...over the battle souvenirs of his Portuguese ancestors, who for 900 years had fought in many European armies (two were Austrian field marshals). Too young for World War I, De Henriquez fascinatedly watched the bombardment of Trieste from his roof while others cowered in cellars, at war's end begged and bought heaps of surplus materiel...
Kataki (by Shimon Wincelberg) is a play, originally done on television (TIME, March 24, 1958), with two characters, one of them a Japanese soldier who speaks all but a few of his lines in Japanese. Marooned with him on a South Pacific island near the end of World War II is a bird-brained, teen-age American G.I. who chitters with naive notions and cliches. The Japanese is seemingly incapable of an ignoble act, while the American is a bundle of petty spites and treachery...
Once it nears its Auden-inspired moral ("We must love one another-or die"), Kataki is becalmed. For its first half, the play, however pawed, ticks with time-bomb suspense; toward the end, there is merely the tame metronome's beat marking empty theatrical time...
Eilshemius' muse was wayward, poetic, and in the end cruel. Critic Duncan Phillips notes that in one picture Eilshemius "symbolically depicted himself as adrift, all alone, in a fragile bark rushed along by the fierce currents of wild, rapid waters which swirl around an island under a witching moon. It is a symbol of all futility and frustration under the Tantalus of beauty and romance. It tells of his endless efforts to land on the island of desire...