Word: idiom
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...factional politics; the neoclassicists rail at the atonalists for their dehumanized experimentation and the latter hiss back at their opponents's "superfiuous," "reactionary" conservatism. If a composer finds no camp congenial, he must have great skill to select the elements from several schools, integrate them into a distinctly personal idiom, and still avoid the short-comings of a patchwork eclecticism...
Last week 54 of Rothko's paintings were on display at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, showing 15 years of the development of a man who is one of the top half-dozen abstract painters in the U.S.-one who has created a personal idiom that pleases the initiated but to the others dramatizes some of the limitations of abstractionism. In canvas after canvas, glowing rectangles of color float over other rectangles. Each canvas is a study in contradiction: everything seems in shimmering motion, but nothing moves at all. The paintings offer windows looking out on blind...
Night Flights. The composer was introduced to the twelve-tone idiom in 1924 at the Florence premiere of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire. "Only two people in the hall were impressed by the music," he recalls. "One was a very unimportant young man. Me. The other was Giacomo Puccini." Dallapiccola, who for a time composed in a largely traditional, tonal style (he has always been an ardent Wagner fan), gradually started learning twelve-tone technique, teaching himself by studying Schoenberg's scores. "But in those days nobody appreciated my music," and he and his wife were sometimes reduced...
Utter Strangeness. The twelve-tone idiom is music's only salvation, according to Prophet Hodeir, but of all twelve-toners, perhaps only Jean Barraqué measures up to Critic Hodeir's ideal: "A world of utter strangeness." In Hodeir's view, Barraqué's Séquence for soprano and chamber orchestra is one of the "rare works in the history of music," and "the greatest piece of music written in Europe since Debussy's last period." Barraqué's unfinished La Mart de Virgile, to which he expects to devote the rest...
Even now, Rattner speaks with bitterness in his special idiom of the "art burlesque stage of today the dehumanized designs that will "freeze one out of his livingness." His own canvases are often battlefields of hope and despair, evil and salvation-elongated figures imbedded in chunks of burning colors. By comparison, his window at first glance seems almost coldly abstract, but it is in fact a work of passion...