Word: instrumentality
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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With a bow to Conductor Leopold Stokowski, a bow to the Philadelphia Orchestra, a bow to the audience in Manhattan's Philharmonic Hall, stocky Kimio Eto adjusted his formal robes and settled before a 6-ft.-long stringed instrument that looked like the fuselage of an unfinished model airplane. He bowed again, and a kettledrum thundered to begin the premiere of Modernist Composer Henry Cowell's Concerto for Koto and Orchestra, the first concerto ever composed by a Westerner for the 1,100-year-old Japanese instrument...
Plucking the silk strings claw-hammer fashion with his right hand, Eto drew an incisive, harplike sound from the koto. As if feeling a pulse, his left hand roamed the length of the instrument, deftly depressing the vibrating strings in order to vary tones and lend the tinge of melancholy that is the unique trait of the koto. The opening melody, sketched against a background of moaning strings and sudden percussive bursts, followed the austere style of the ancient gagaku court music of Japan, then shifted in the second movement to a distinctly Western hymnal theme. In the final movement...
...year later went to Tokyo for private lessons with the late Miyagi Michio, a sightless composer-performer famed for creating a new form of koto music based on Western influences. In 1953, determined to carry on the work of his teacher and popularize the koto as a solo instrument in the Western world, he took up residence in the U.S. He now lives in New York City, divides his time between composing and touring college campuses...
...most Christians are not ready to proclaim the death of the church or to embrace the skeletonized faith of the future that some modern-day reformers propose. The World Council's Visser 't Hooft notes that the much-questioned territorial parish has proved to be a valuable instrument in Soviet-bloc countries, where it remains the one autonomous institution in a would-be omnicompetent state. Roman Catholic Layman Michael Novak warns that even if the institutional church withers away, another will eventually take its place, and that "there is no way of so organizing life that holiness...
...heard her could forget her. Wanda Landowska saw to that. A tiny black-clad priestess, palms pressed together in prayer, she would float in hushed silence to her altar, the harpsichord. A Romantic who played pre-Romantic music, she got shadings and majestic effects seemingly impossible on her instrument, and no one could equal her in bringing to independent life Bach's intertwined melodies. She took great liberties in interpretation, serenely confident of the backing of the dead composer. "You continue to play Bach your way," she told one musician. "I shall continue to play Bach his way. What...