Word: milhaud
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...front, played in Army bands on the Coast and in the ETO (where he rarely traveled with fewer than three liberated pianos). He was home again in 1946, determined to be a composer. He played the piano in local joints and studied with France's famed Darius Milhaud at Mills College. Teacher Milhaud filled him with counterpoint and polytonality, fired him with the conviction that improvisation of jazz was as valid for him as the improvisation of toccatas and fugues was for Bach. "He told me," says Dave, "if I didn't stick to jazz...
Last week Composer Kirchner. an associate professor of music at U.S.C., added a new plum to his rich pudding: he was named a full professor at California's up-to-date Mills College, whose faculty already includes famed French Composer Darius Milhaud...
...fourteen hundred ninety-two, as any schoolboy knows, Columbus sailed the ocean blue to discover a passage to India. But that is not the way the story goes in Christophe Colomb, the 25-year-old opera by Darius Milhaud, with a text by French Poet Paul Claudel. In Rome last week, the gigantic work got a full stage performance for the first time since its 1930 Berlin premiere (it has had concert performances in Manhattan and Paris, abridged productions in Cologne and Buenos Aires). Unfortunately, Rome's critical opera audience was neither wholly delighted musically nor enlightened historically...
Untroubled by any theory that the earth is round, Milhaud's Columbus goes on a purely religious mission: his "new world" represents the "other world," the kingdom of heaven. Columbus himself (sung by Piero Guelfi) is first seen as an old man, fingering the shackles that once held him. Then, quick as an amoeba, he splits in two: the man as seen by his contemporaries and the hero posterity thinks him to be. He sets out on his mission partly because of the arrival of a mystical dove (representing the Holy Ghost), while beyond the seas, certain Mexican deities...
Romans found the choral music interesting, occasionally quietly melodious,and beautifully sung. They gave the work respectful applause, although they found the production as a whole just too much to take in, and never quite understandable. Old (61) Darius Milhaud, who was on hand for the occasion, had no such reservations. "I was so satisfied," he said, "that I couldn't suggest any change...