Word: highbrowed
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...investigator in the dress and waist industry, became an assistant cement tester in the U.S. Bureau of Standards, a U.S. Navy radio operator in World War I. He was also an unsuccessful playwright, a student of philosophy, education, socialism, editor of two highbrow magazines (Dial, The Sociological Review) and the American Caravan, an anthology of promising U.S. writers. In 1931, aged 36, Mumford sat down "to bring together, within a common frame, the ideas I had so far formulated on machines, cities, buildings, social life and people...
Thirty years ago music in this country was either something highbrow that happened to a few rich people at the Metropolitan or else it was something lowbrow called ragtime that nobody took seriously. Most Americans thought of music as something from the Old World-of tenors as Italians, of sopranos as big, blonde German women. And the best of our popular music came from Vienna...
Within a generation all this has changed. The U.S. now supports more symphony orchestras than all the rest of the world put together. High school children can recognize as many classics as the average music teacher could two generations ago-and highbrow musicians, in their turn, are much more familiar with our popular songs and less Olympian about them. And so the primary concern of our Music department today is with reporting the new impact of music on American life as it wells up from the great national pool of melody which is broadcast, phonographed, sung, hummed and played, danced...
...Loop. Unlike most specialists in swinging the classics, Dorothy begins by playing her classics as straight as any Town Hall pianist. When she has polished off Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C-Sharp Minor, Schubert's Serenade or a batch of Chopin Nocturnes in the most acceptable highbrow fashion, Dorothy shuts her eyes. Her feet begin to pound the floor. Her face contorts as if she were in agony. What comes after that is pure Donegan. It has Elmer's customers shagging in their seats...
...supposed antipathy of the highbrow "classicists" to all forms of popular music is a strangely persistent myth that keeps cropping up all the time in writings and discussions about jazz. Last Monday's interesting "Swing" column, for instance, used the phrases "blinded by tastes" and "overexposure to culture" to express what a lot of people honestly and unthinkingly believe, that classical music, in contrast to popular but ungrammatical jazz, is some sort of esoteric cubbyhole where a number of aesthetes hide away from the common emotions...