Word: high-brow
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...citizens who stay away from concerts, the best-known high-brow composer now living is probably Russian-born Sergei Vassilievich Rachmaninoff. His crashing Prelude in C-Sharp Minor, first introduced to the U. S. in 1898 by his friend Pianist Alexander Siloti, immediately started to outsell Tin Pan Alley's song hits, has rolled up a total of some 5,000,000 copies. In 1909, when 36-year-old Rachmaninoff made his U. S. debut as a concert pianist, the "Flatbush* Prelude," as it was then known, had made his exotic name familiar to U. S. lips...
Nobody expects jazz musicians to play symphonies. But some high-brow concert audiences still think that symphonic musicians can play jazz. Symphonies are made to be played in concert halls for people who buy tickets to listen to them; the best jazz is made up on the spur of the moment, belongs in the jam session or the dance hall. Last week in Philadelphia's mid-Victorian Academy of Music, members of the Philadelphia Orchestra, under platinum-blond Maestro Leopold Stokowski, jiggled and swayed, did their best to lose their educated musician's sense of discipline, tried embarrassingly...
George Gershwin, Louis Gruenberg, John Alden Carpenter, most famous of U. S. nationalist composers, have avoided jazz symphonies, contenting themselves with writing rhapsodies, operas, ballets, tone-poems. Loudest pooh-poohing of their efforts has come, not from high-brow critics and musicians, but from swing and hot jazz fans who find this symphonic jazz stiff and imitative...
...rowdy comedy is "Three Men on a Horse". Simple in structure, very Damon Runyon in execution, it has a contagious hilarity and nonsense which must bring all but the utterly high-brow to uproarious laughter. Erwin Trowbridge, henpecked author of verses for Mother's Day greeting cards has a bitter quarrel with his spouse and is so far diverted from his routine that he goes not to the office but forthwith to a very low pub where he falls in with a group of down-at-the-heels race track touts. It has been Erwin's harmless amusement...
Perhaps this very straight-forward, sound shallowness will save them from the fate of many efforts at high-brow education over the radio. One cannot educate fifty million people in time to prevent the deluge. Even college graduates, moreover, have been known not to understand the complications of the present economic situation. So a league of crusaders, fighting the obvious demagoguery which now abounds, appealing to American horse-sense, may be just the right weapon in the word-fight of the depression...