Word: essayed
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...traditional musical system championed by Arnoid Schoenberg--is prefaced by the revealing remark. "But it was serialism more than populism that impeded the evolution of truly American music." Rockwell can't decide which side he is on, the side of serialist Milton Babbitt of Princeton--who once wrote an essay entitled. "Who; Cares if You Listen?"--or the avowedly populist Elliott Carter--whom he accuses of having a "more calculated attitude towards world success" than Babbitt. His classical composers are placed in a musical Catch--22; either they are anti-public or so commercial that they compromise their values...
...outsider" or vanguard composer for'eign willing to depart from the ordinary and then give the distinct impression that his subject is not worth writing about. In the middle of a discussion of the problems posed by minimalist composer Philip Glass, he says of the subject of an earlier essay. "A composer like [Frederic] Rzewski can shift facilely from idiom to idiom because, to be blunt, nobody cares what he does, least of all the people...
...similarly cynical about performance artist Laurie Anderson in an essay ostensibly about "Women Composers," he immediately casts doubt over his choice of women by stating," some artists suddenly become trendy and hot. They may sustain their recognition, of they may slip from view. At this writing, about the hottest, trendiest artist in SoHo is Laurie Anderson." Later in the essay he accomplishes the almost impossible task of negating one of his statements in the same sentence. "But her wit clearly entrances her audiences, and has helped secure her reputation. So has the very fact that she is a woman, although...
...BOOK'S final essay Rockwell hurriedly fills in the gaps left by the rest of the work. Rock, he correctly argues, has forever lost its innocence to "artistic self-awareness." Even primitivism, from the Velvet Underground to the New York Dolls to Flipper, is essentially self-conscious. Today's hart-core punks are often far from the lowlife scum image they create and the violence of their music comes more as a rebellious expression of frustration with a static, repressive, bourgeois society than as a statement of being...
...Rockwell only mentions punk as context for an essay on the Talking Heads and effectively dismisses the genre after smugly declaring. "This flamboyant, often speeded-up rock and exuberant, nihilistic life-style never really caught on in New York; the Dolls and, later, the Ramones helped inspire the movement, but didn't realize it fully themselves." Rockwell's fixation with the "New York scene" is part and parcel of his overall preference for the cerebral over the emotional the arty over the visceral...