Word: fromme
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...phrase rings of Erich Fromm's description of the orgiastic union: "the world outside disappears, and with it the feeling of separateness from it." The ecstasy -- in Fromm as in the film--is always ephemeral. The public that filled Time's letter columns and opposed the film on moral grounds also bought many millions of copies of Fromm's Art of Loving, and made his ideas popular wisdom. In showing the orgiastic tryst as an ultimate failure, the film plays out a moral well within that wisdom. The departure from bourgeois morality lies in the deeper implication that the characters...
...Paul Fromm, and in the 14 years since that meeting he has continued to express his love of contemporary music in the most practical way. Each year he has set aside up to $100,000 and, through his Fromm Music Foundation, parceled it out in commissions to an international Who's Who of composers: Milton Babbitt, Alberto Ginastera, Alan Hovhaness, Ernst Krenek, Roger Sessions, Stefan Wolpe -some 90 names in all. Composer Gunther Schuller describes Fromm as "the single most important benefactor in the field of contemporary music...
Boos. "Composers," says Fromm, "are the sources of musical culture; yet their status in the musical world is uncertain. They are professionals without a profession." Fromm's efforts to offset this situation begin rather than end with his individual commissions ($1,000 for a piece by a young unknown, up to $5,000 for one by an established master). He befriends his composers-most often while they are still obscure -keeps in touch with them, sells wine to them. He makes sure that their works get performed and even subsidizes recordings. "There can be no living musical atmosphere...
Nowhere is this interaction better exemplified than at the Fromm-supported Festival of Contemporary Music each summer at Tanglewood. Last week the festival marked the 20th anniversary of Fromm's foundation with a week of special concerts, forums and workshops, which, for Fromm, were fraught with both the perils and joys of being a modern Maecenas. When members of the Boston Symphony rehearsed for the premiere of Fromm's latest commission, an electronically amplified violin concerto by Charles Wuorinen, they disliked the piece so much that they booed. When the Tanglewood listeners heard it, some of them booed...
Much more successful were reprises of two of the most important works ever commissioned by Fromm: Luciano Berio's Circles (1960) and Elliott Carter's Double Concerto for Harpsichord and Piano with Two Chamber Orchestras (1961). These performances flanked a rare public appearance by Fromm in which he pleaded eloquently for better integration of contemporary and traditional music rather than a mere "busing of indiscriminately chosen new music to the halls of Brahms and Beethoven...