Word: haggin
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Typical of the commercial trend is the new Record Album-of-the-Month Club, an illogical offspring of the book club species, Serving no original function, the Club duplicates already excellent record reviews such as those of the Gramophone Shop and Bernard Haggin, while high-pressuring gramophone owners into buying albums of similar music which they could have purchased all along. Encouraging musical inertia and lack of discrimination, the new group misses a chance to concentrate on new music, and winds up by mailing the dances from "Prince Igor" one month and "Annie Get Your Gun" the next...
Hard Work. Haggin knows, however, what every musician knows: that the riches of music are only to be gotten by those with an appreciation of the whole tonal text: "A piece of music is, to begin with, an organization of sounds; experiencing it begins with hearing the sounds and the way they are related in each phrase, the relation of one phrase to the next in the progression; and learning to hear these relations is at the same time a process by which you learn to follow the grammar and logic of musical thought...
...this, thanks to the phonograph, it is not necessary to know "the technical facts and names of what you are hearing." With the help of a cardboard ruler (provided with each volume), to indicate positions on records, Haggin guides his reader through recordings of more than a score of great compositions, pointing out the developing musical speech of each, the points of special eloquence. Of his reader he asks hard eye & ear work, but in the end the possible rewards may include, for instance, "the right frame of mind to listen to one of the greatest wonders achieved by human...
Shut Up. Bernard Haggin, an angular musical zealot who looks a decade younger than his 44 years, has been a New Yorker from his lower East Side boyhood, through the College of the City of New York, to his present upper West Side hideaway. There he keeps a super-phonograph, whose sensitive entrails are always getting out of whack, and a Mason & Hamlin, which he has been known to play for bosom friends. On paper he has no facility whatever, but by main strength has made himself a writer of exceptional pith and clarity (Music On Records, A Book...
...paper, Haggin has a comic gift for impersonating musical stuffed shirts. He can also tell howlers on himself: once, at a concert, when he glared at Violinist Jacques Gordon, who was noisily shuffling a score, Gordon glared back at the noiseless Haggin and growled: "Shut...