Word: esotericism
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To really advanced physicists, nuclear fission is old, dull stuff. What excites them now is "ultra-nucleonics," study of "the elementary particles within the atom which are capable of releasing thousands of times as much energy as is produced by the nuclear fission on which the A-bomb is based...
Last week Sartre, the high prophet of existentialism (TIME, Jan. 28), gave New Yorkers who read Town & Country an esoteric's cloud-high view of their metropolis, packed tight with steel, stone and bricks. Wrote he:
I protest! . . . You do [Bela Bartok] a great injustice by saying that "his music got played, if at all, before esoteric little groups of modernist composers and musicians who had built up a tolerance to what the uninitiated regarded as barnyard music" [TIME, March 18].
Like many another composer, Hungary's Bela Bartók lived and died a poor man. His sour and peppery music was bitterly condemned by many critics; audiences seemed to like it even less. Mostly it got played, if at all, before esoteric little groups of modernist composers and...
Says Szigeti: "The mental inertia of the music-listening public is something so terrifying it is better not to think of it. Our sluggish mental habits make so much great music seem esoteric. We shut out our participation because we are afraid. Bartók is one of the imperishable...