Word: idioms
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...envisions Australia in winter as an army of gumbooted koala bears and who can find menace in his pajamas ("The tops are alright-it's the bottoms you've got to watch") must be lovable. Richard Benjamin is not. Too broad for the English idiom, he appears to have strayed from a road company of Fiddler on the Roof. Eric Thompson directs with the same ordered frenzy he applied to Ayckbourn's hit of last year, Absurd Person Singular, but this time he is hampered by a company that fails to become an ensemble...
Leder's studio is cluttered with his work, all in a wide variety of sizes, colors, styles and media. There is a huge still-life on one wall; small washes on another; an abstract sculpture; a Spanish nobleman's portrait; a land-scape like one of Cezanne's. "An idiom," Leder says, "will emerge. I don't want to be tied down to any specific thing. Most painters are in their forties before their own particular way of painting emerges...
This new musical language is marvelous for the expression of horror, desolation, despair, and other standard 20th-century emotions. It is less appropriate for pastoral scenes or nostalgic longing. For the expression of these states, a more conservative, traditional idiom is needed, and Aaron Copland, whose Appalachian Spring was the second work of the concert, is one of the century's great conservatives. Appalachian Spring uses an intentionally accesible idiom which relies on triads and simple melodies mostly drawn from folk-songs to evoke a "pioneer celebration of Spring...
Schoenberg began composing in an atmosphere of fin-de-siecle decadence with the ponderously rich chromatic harmonies of the post-Wagnerian idiom. He matured as a composer at a time when tonality, the structure which had supported music for over 300 years, was finally sinking under the bloated burden of its own chromaticism into an anarchic morass. The ferment which resulted from the destruction of the old order gave rise to Schoenberg's great expressionist compositions like the sextet Verklarte Nacht, which seems to breathe in that decaying, sickeningly rich atmosphere, and Pierrot Lunaire, which for many is the ultimate...
...after ten years without publishing a single work, Schoenberg produced his first compositions in the twelve-tone idiom. An intellectual creation of the highest order, this system is a logical outgrowth of 19th century chromaticism and turn-of-the-century atonality, which both moved toward giving an equal significance to each of the twelve tones. It is a method which has dominated the musical life of this century, eventually exercising a hold even on Igor Stravinsky, the man who had once seemed the great opponent of this serial technique...