Word: fermata
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...best works--his novels The Mezzanine and A Box of Matches, and U and I, his book-length study of John Updike--contain passages so beautifully observed and perfectly formed that they stick in the mind for years. His lesser works--the sweaty, oversharing sexcursions Vox and The Fermata and his tetchy political rant Checkpoint--contain passages you could spend years trying to forget...
...wonderful thing when a rapper decides to embrace manhood. But back to the music. It’s hard not to be enraptured by Freeway’s impassioned, raspy voice, just as it’s tough to underestimate his intuition for placing a fermata above a lyric just where it’s needed. If Otis Redding rapped, he might be Freeway. The album’s melodies are sparse, beautiful, often sampled from old soul hits, marked by heraldic horns and enough jazz flute to make Herbie Mann proud. “Free at Last?...
That's about all you get, plotwise, but you'll find it's all you need. In A Box of Matches, Baker's first novel in five years--and his first good one in much longer (let's try to forget the clammy sexual intimacies of Vox and The Fermata)--Baker returns to the delightfully discursive, observational voice he used in his first novel, The Mezzanine. But in A Box of Matches this voice has acquired a husky resonance it never had before, a basso register that hints at dark, existential depths. Daydreams of suicide flit at the edge...
...what the composer has written. I don't follow some tradition or recording that some famous conductor did ten years ago. My book, The Complacent Conductor, has been attacked by thousands of conductors. They put their egos first, in a way saying, 'Look, I'm better. Beethoven needs a fermata here,' rather than trusting the score completely. I'm in hot water with thousands of people today because of this...