Word: harshness
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...this was fortunate not only for the New Deal but for Franklin Roosevelt. Though he makes a public virtue of welcoming "constructive criticism," the President is comparatively sensitive to harsh words. And of late an increasing number of harsh words have been getting into press comment on his Administration. If the President really was losing some of his good will with the nation's publishers, he took a step last week which won him a fresh armful of bouquets from them- and a shower of brickbats from organized reporters. Over the protest of the American Newspaper Guild, President Roosevelt...
...HARSH VOICE-Rebecca West- Doubleday, Doran ($2.50). Four ironic novelettes by the aging enfant terrible of literary London. Three turn on the comic interplay of differing conceptions of love, one on murder...
...Stravinsky was pronounced a genius and he went on to write Le Sacre du Printemps, his historic harsh-rhythmed paean to fertility in the spring. In Paris the first-night audience shouted and hissed so loudly that the dancers were unable to hear the music. The white-faced Nijinsky beat time from the wings. A Londoner was so outraged that he wrote a letter to the Times calling Le Sacre "a threat against the foundations of our tonal institutions . . . [standing for] all the unnameable horrors of revolution, murder and rapine. ... It should have been dedicated to Dr. Crippen, the dentist...
...prophesy what Stravinsky would do next. But nothing could have surprised them so much as when he suddenly turned his back on vivid picture-music, announced a "return to Bach." Whether or not the placid Kapellmeister would have recognized Stravinsky as a colleague is a matter of grave dispute. Harsh critics say that Stravinsky changed his style because his rich ideas were spent. But modernists have continued to watch him closely, for even in his "classicism" his rules have been his own. He wrote Les Noces for percussion, pianos and chorus. For Oedipus Rex, his "operaoratorio," the Greek story...
...audience were impressed by an orchestra practically denuded of strings, or by a hero who strutted the stage in petticoats, his face covered with lather and a razor in hand for shaving. Stravinsky enthusiasts point reverently to his Symphony of Psalms which most laymen find cerebral, harsh, forbidding with its predominant brasses. Stravinsky's smaller works would seem like sketches if it were not for his sure, crafty workmanship, his uncanny gift for making each instrument behave like a soloist. In March Boston will pass verdict on his ballet Persephone, lately produced in Paris by Dancer Ida Rubenstein...