Word: joplin
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...solid year now, Billboard's chart of bestselling classical LPs has been topped by Scott Joplin rags. Last week there was a surprising change: Stravinsky's Rite of Spring led the list. Though revolutionary when first performed in 1913, the work is now a cliché of concert programming; 28 stereo versions are currently available. It seems likely that ragtime fell not to Stravinsky but to Georg Solti, who leads the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Solti (TIME cover, May 7, 1973) has quietly become the most popular conductor since Toscanini. A Solti appearance is sold out at once anywhere...
...Manhattan artist's comment on Thomas Hart Benton, who died of heart disease in his studio in Kansas City, Mo., last week, was not a bad epitaph. In the course of a career that spanned seven decades (from his first job as cartoonist for a local paper in Joplin), Benton became the most popular 20th century American artist. His belligerently folksy murals, full of the pleasures of the hoedown and the Fourth of July picnic, the innocence of hillbilly Arcadia and the rigors of the frontier, were the very furniture of patriotism. And Benton's popularity was largely...
...Phil Spector, multifaceted rock tycoon, wrote the lyrics, produced the records and pocketed most of the profits. In the '60s the men who sold pop music saw women as petulant screamers (Lesley Gore) or filigreed folkies (Judy Collins). Occasionally, women defied the image makers. Janis Joplin and Grace Slick escaped briefly from San Francisco psychedelia. But separated from their back-up bands, neither prospered for very long. Joplin turned to drugs, and Slick lost her creative flair...
Arthur MacKenzie, piano, will perform works of Tchaikovsky, Moussorgsky, Debussy, Joplin and Barber...
Today, however, being up to date does not seem quite as important as it once did. The reason lies partly in the same craving for nostalgia that in the pop world has brought back Scott Joplin and 1950s' rock 'n' roll. Mostly it seems to stem from a foundering of the musical avant-garde and a desire on the part of performers and audiences alike to reassess what was going on while the twelve-tone and electronic boys were holding sway in the academies...