Word: harped
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Enderby, 45, a flabby, balding and toothless bachelor, is the poet as anti-stereotype. The wind that blows on his Aeolian harp comes out mostly as stomach gas. Belching and backfiring, he sits on his toilet seat day after monotonous day composing a narrative poem about the Minotaur. Yet, as manuscript slowly fills the bathtub, Enderby is a happy and fulfilled man. Living off dividends and tiny royalties, he really needs "nothing except more talent...
...most ambitions presentations of the evening were Untitled Dance by Radcliffe's Donna Brooks, Declension by Rima Wolff, Nina Adolph's Changes 1--both graduate students at Harvard, and Imagine this Dance to Harp Music from Brandeis. All these choreographers do create some very fine tableaus, especially in the last three dances. But they shatter these moments of beauty as soon as they regroup the performers. Changes 1 probably illustrates best what is wrong with the choreography. To a quite unmemorable sound collage by David Maxwell, the dancers as a tightly interwoven group walk diagonally across the stage while...
...racing notes melt into an indistinguishable blur. In every case he clearly solved the problem of extracting the melodic line from a morass of notes and floating it above the cleanly formed accompaniment. His facility was most clearly demonstrated in the familiar "Aeolian Harp" Etude where the simple tune--played entirely by the pinky of the right hand--holds forth against a feathery arpeggiated figure. Success here requires no more than complete control of the hands and a little extra thought in the practice room...
Like a Pharaoh's tomb, the stage is stocked with the relics of a bygone life: a clutter of armoires and grandfather clocks, quaint archaic radios and phonographs, fringed lampshades and a golden harp. A man in a policeman's uniform slowly enters the attic room and sniffs the dust of decades. He walks over to the harp and plucks at a string. It is slack, jangled and flat-an omen of the theatrical evening to come...
...disdained the spicy suavity of French and Russian music, especially the orchestrations ("A harp in an orchestra is like a hair in the soup"). Yet his sonorous, spontaneous-sounding scores so deftly exploit the personality of individual instruments that they speak like characters in a drama-in fact, they often battle each other. His Clarinet Concerto, for example, is built around an argument between the clarinet and snare drum, with the orchestra kibitzing...