Word: maxfield
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...years ago had an attribute not shared by the pop art of today: it was popular. The most popular of the artists of that time, Maxfield Parrish, now 93, painted book illustrations and calendars that were reproduced by the millions. College boys hung his works in their rooms amidst a clutter of crew oars, fencing foils and mooseheads. From a first cover for Harper's Weekly in 1895, he painted on to become the country's best-paid artist...
...Maxfield has extensive musical and electronic background. Unlike the European experimenters in the field, he does not use electronic music as a medium for serial composition but as a more far-reaching attempt to broaden the listening powers of the concert audience. As such I think the best of his works succeed. His compositions remind us that music is, after all, merely sound organized by men in some purposeful fashion, and that its limits are set by its purpose. His belief that music is experience, not communication, helps to destroy the straight-jacket that social forms and traditional compositions have...
...Maxfield's music is legitimate because its sounds and textures are not miscellaneous but on the contrary are obviously carefully selected. Unity and coherence keep the sounds from appearing random, gimmicky or incomprehensible. Continuity of tone color was particularly prominent in Night Music, where long whines, wheezes and whistles soared up one after another among balloons of deep sound burgeoning from beneath. The extra-musical connotations enhanced the experience: staccato bursts that began like machine-gun rounds softened into bird-like chirps...
...with other modern composers, formlessness is Maxfield's most glaring flaw. In order to integrate chance into form, Maxfield cuts his tape into short segments which he then fits together without plan. In Peripateia either these segments were too short or the original tape had no contrasts. I felt that the piece was static and monotonous because it lacked 'events'--that is, a sequences of random happenings that would give a sense of succession of ideas or moods. At its worst, Maxfield's music has an over-blown, almost Mahlerian grandiloquence...
...Maxfield does display a rather healthy reaction against the worship of incommunicable individual creativity practiced by some of his colleagues. Their romanticism, he feels, is merely a narcissistic exhibition of a self-assumed superiority. Maxfield has the modest aim of stimulating his audience, but yet his self-denigration cannot fully hide a potentiality for deeper expression...