Word: familiarization
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Since the early years of the twentieth century, when Debussy and Schoenberg made their experiments beyond the familiar ground of tonality, composers have been faced with the problem of choosing a style from a large and exceedingly miscellaneous group of alternatives. These days composers can pick from a selection that ranges from modified romanticism (Poulenc) or modified Puccini (Menotti) through Stravinsky's neo-classic manner to Schoenberg or Berg or exotic explorers like Varese. Of course, a composer can scramble two, or three, or ten of these together and arrive at something unrecognizable enough to prompt the conscientious newspaper reviewer...
...preserve tonality (which might be defined briefly as a system in which one tone, or a chord built on that tone, acts as a sort of aural home base) he has the advantage of manipulating the vocabulary of musical relations and tensions with which most of us are familiar since we have grown up in a world dominated by eighteenth and nineteenth-century tonality. Bartok's tonality is not Mozart's but it is tonality nevertheless, and many of Bartok's devices are familiar nineteenth century formulas...
...great organizing force has been strong enough to dominate most of the production of Bartok, Stravinsky, and Hindemith. It dominates a good deal of the music being written today. The atonalists have not found it easy to resist. How can a piece of music be held together without the familiar tonal relationships? Some composers (Elliott Carter, for example) have attempted highly individual and cerebral ways of unifying a large work. Others have seen a revivifying solution in the twelve-tone system, from which has grown one of the most important languages in contemporary music...
Schaus's party won, and last week, when the new government was formed, the furor over the accidents produced a major casualty. Portly, white-haired Joseph Bech, 72-a Christian Socialist who has been Foreign Minister for the past 33 years and a familiar florid figure at nearly every international conference since League of Nations days, in the company of the famed from Lloyd George to Macmillan-lost his job. The new Foreign Minister: Eugene Schaus...
...would all this force really be effective against the will of 3,000,000 blacks, Sir Robert Armitage was asked. He replied: "I doubt it." The sad, familiar communiques had begun: because of the threat of trouble, "security forces had been obliged to open fire," and the casualty lists followed. Force could not make Nyasaland accept the domination it feared from Southern Rhodesia. Many predicted the end of federation. But this was no answer, argued London's Economist. Poor Nyasaland would become a "rural slum"; self-governing Southern Rhodesia, isolated, would become a satellite of South Africa, and Africa...