Word: fiddlers
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Eventually, as recordings crossed the Atlantic, a question was being asked seriously: Is Russia's David Oistrakh the world's finest fiddler...
Roger Sessions writes "difficult" music and likes it that way. When the headlines reported MODERNIST SYMPHONY BOOED, after his first Symphony was played in Philadelphia in 1935, he was delighted. When people called his Violin Concerto unplayable, he shrugged and looked around until he found himself a fiddler who could play it. Last week in Princeton, N.J., Sessions' long (75 minutes) one-act opera, The Trial of Lucullus, got its first hearing in the East. The score was, as usual, pretty tough going, but at least nobody booed...
...those letters stand for, don't you," he shouted. "They stand for 'Grand Cretin' (Great Imbecile), and that's exactly what you are!" After that, Civrac-en-Medoc became a village divided. The mayor habitually referred to the violin-playing priest as "that low-life fiddler," and the priest called the mayor a pagan. On the priest's side were the pious; ranged against him were the mayor, Policeman Mocriau, the proprietor
...word got around among U.S. orchestras: if you want to perform a modern violin score, get Spivakovsky. Temperamentally, that was fine for the fiddler, but to programmers and booking agents too much modern music is not good business. Tossy Spivakovsky learned that there was such a thing as an unbalanced portfolio, successfully set out to rid himself of the modernist...
...fanatically artistic spell by taking clear, cold, head-on pictures of ordinary people and things. "After Stieglitz's real work was done," says Realist Evans, "he became a very arty old man and a Wagnerian man if there ever was one-a great old fiddler and lace-maker." Evans' realistic approach has inspired a generation of photographers, among them Margaret Bourke-White, who first made her mark photographing industry, and Dorothea Lange, who photographed California's migratory pea-pickers to show the effects of the Depression. Echoing the early Weegee, Evans says: "Photography is for the record...