Word: ivesiana
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...audience was perplexed. What was George Balanchine trying to do, anyhow? One week be premiered his rollicking, straightforward Western Symphony with his New York City Ballet (TIME, Sept. 20), then he turned around and dished out this weird puzzler called Ivesiana. The music, which was by that half-legendary New Englander, the late Charles Ives, was peculiar enough, with its crotchety rhythms and its wispy dissonances-but what happened on stage was even odder...
Anyway, it was Balanchine, and he is a genius, as everybody knows. Even if Ivesiana wasn't very clear, it was fun, and so the crowd gave the cast a nice hand at the end. Next day most of Manhattan's mystified dance reviewers declined to evaluate the ballet, although they paid their respects to distinguished Composer Ives (an insurance broker who pioneered polytonal music in the U.S. in his spare time, died this year at 79). But the Daily News's Douglas Watt found something positive to report about the ballet in Allegra Kent...
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