Word: kellers
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...Hans Keller is a London music critic whose aim is to stop most talk about music. This apparently self-destructive ambition is prompted by Keller's belief that emotions slip through the loom of language like herring through a cargo net. Keller's solution: analysis by music instead of by words. His criticism of Mozart's String Quartet in D Minor (K. 421) broadcast last week from Hamburg, convincingly demonstrated that a few snatches of music, pointedly juxtaposed, can make a sharper comment on a composition than a column of critical prose...
Aside from its tendency to jargon, the trouble with verbal music criticism, says Keller, is that it tends to describe musical forms but fails to penetrate beyond them to the "fundamental unity" at the heart of a composition. To lay music's "inner architecture" bare, the critic must abandon language ("The age of description is over") and so immerse himself in analysis of a work that he "lives with it and dreams about...
Vienna-born Critic Keller, 38, a violinist and teacher, wrote verbal criticism exclusively for years before he decided that words failed him. They simply created "unbearable divisions," he says, "between music critics and music lovers." His Mozart analysis was hailed by word-bound, cliche-tied British critics as "a most important departure." Keller is now working on an analysis of Beethoven's String Quartet, Opus 95. Says he: "Most of what passes for musical criticism today is sheer bunk; I think functional analysis will bring about the twilight of the twaddle." He is not disturbed by the thought that...
...pole vault was more or less of a bust last year," he commented, "but we have all the busts back, along with a couple of pretty good sophomores." He expressed the hope that one or two first rate vaulters could be developed from amongst Dick Williams, Barnes Keller, Doc Bennett, and Pat Liles...
...fact: the Truman Administration muddled along spending about $1,000,000 a year on long-range ballistics missilery (while a lot of the progress was made by Consolidated Vultee Aircraft, paying for experiments on the Atlas ICBM out of its own pocket). Moreover, Chrysler's able Keller, far from being a czar, was an "appraiser" of the missile program, did his able job within that limited authority...