Word: fi
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Billed as the biggest international bazaar in Western Hemisphere history, the U.S. World Trade Fair brought 3,000 displays and 43 national pavilions into the four floors of Manhattan's Coliseum. For a fort night buyers from the Americas looked over motor scooters from Italy and hi-fi equipment from Japan, inspected silks from Hong Kong and a pair of Queen Victoria's pantaloons exhibited by Britain's Lux-Lux, Ltd. (underwear), sampled coffee from Brazil and champagne from Israel. Last week, is the show closed, its private U.S. organizers tallied some of the handsome results...
American culture in the fi,fties has at last achieved unity. The break between mass culture and high culture that occurred around the turn of the century, culminated in the cold war of the twenties between the intellectuals and the rest of society. Now that war has been healed by the international crisis, which has placed us all in the same sinking boat, by the spread of liberal education, and by the comforting new ministrations of religion and political philosophy. Today, out of many, we are one. This reunion may have enriched the common stock, but it has also certainly...
...atmosphere. This week Piano Virtuoso Artur Rubinstein (see PEOPLE) enthusiastically echoes Barzun's point that "in spite of our perennial croaking about America's neglect of the arts, the country spends more money for music than the entire rest of the world." Since the hi-fi revolution, a growing slice of that money has been spent on records, which have created a magnificent "concert hall without walls" not only for the classics but for the moderns. TIME'S Music editor listens to the vinyl outpourings, from two dozen record companies, selects the best and most interesting items...
...Fi. The Mapleson recordings are not for the casual listener or the audiophile ("This is not a high fidelity record," says the album jacket testily). Most of the performances are so badly flawed with a variety of grindings, thumpings and banshee wails that the singers and orchestra are barely audible. Solos break off at tantalizing spots. But for all that, the records offer invaluable testimony to the student of singing on the style, range and phrasing of such otherwise unrecorded golden-agers as Jean De Reszke, Albert Saléza and Georg Anthes, and such better-preserved stars as Lillian...
Those who are not well organized emotionally, said Dr. Bowes, "will treat their hi-fi set as the emotionally immature treat a car-as an expression of aggression, as a power symbol." To many it has a sexual connotation: addicts may be seeking a "sterile reproduction without biological bother," and in extreme cases, a record collection becomes a "symbolic harem." Significantly, says Psychiatrist Bowes (married, no children), an addict's wife almost always demands that the volume be turned down: "Perhaps in the male's interest in hi-fi she senses a rival, as shrill and discordant...