Word: instrumentation
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Birnbaum belongs to a musical family: his wife is a professional violist, one of his sons a pianist who also happens to practice law, the other son a flautist who is studying composition at Stanford. Birnbaum himself admits to playing the piano "badly." Can he play a stringed instrument? "Only a tennis racquet," says Birnbaum solemnly, "but I like fiddling with words...
Slava had been glorying for two weeks. For his season's opening the week before, he featured Rudolf Serkin in a velvety performance of Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto, creating a sensitive orchestral accompaniment to Serkin's ethereal tonalities. For the Bernstein concert, Slava took up his own instrument, while Lenny conducted his Three Meditations from "Mass" for Violoncello and Orchestra, an episodic piece that gave listeners a chance to hear Slava produce his exquisite cello sound, to watch his left hand flick across the finger board, his right arm streak like a bowing jet. Both programs were enlivened...
Only a few of the major composers of the 18th and 19th centuries showed much interest in the solo cello; the result was a paucity of literature. It was Casals who gave the cello its modern voice by enlarging its scope as a solo instrument. This emboldened composers, and the result today is a substantial library of fine cello musk. Casals' technical genius, moreover, virtually revolutionized cello playing. He extended the instrument's physical possibilities, stretching his left hand over the finger board instead of sliding it, and in so doing broadened the range of phrasing, intonation and expression...
Mingus, Carter's senior, was one of the '60s bassists who brought the bass into maturity as a jazz instrument, pioneering its use for improvisation, rather than solely rhythm. Mingus remains the most famous of these bassists, and is one of the few bass players now receiving acclaim for original composition...
...contemporaries established. Even early in his career, Carter was indebted to Mingus for giving the bass a major role in jazz improvisation. And yet, he did not follow Mingus into the avant-grade line of jazz; he did not abandon the classic role of the bass as a rhythm instrument...