Word: minotaur
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...ferocious beasts as the lion, wild bull and dragon. Treated with religious awe and epic endowments in their time, such old heroes never fade away, still have power in art. Dorothy Norman thinks she knows the reason. "Why," she asks, "do such age-old concepts as Theseus and the Minotaur, Job and Behemoth, continue to speak to us with such undiminished power?" Her reply: "Because they suggest to us not some remote force or personage, but phases of our own most essential struggle with ourselves...
Last week the weekly trade magazine The Billboard front-paged some corroborating statistics. Three major labels, Columbia, Mercury and MGM, devoted the largest part of their summer releases to modern works, e.g., Aaron Copland's Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson, Elliott Carter's The Minotaur. With several other companies contributing, 50 contemporary compositions were released this summer. This brings the impressive total of 20th century compositions on records to some 1,500, with about 240 composers represented. By comparison, there are only 776 works represented by 48 composers of the first half of the 19th century...
...this elite in good standing is Manhattan's Elliott Cook Carter,* who, at 47, is just coming into his own: a recording of his String Quartet by the Walden Quartet is being released (by Columbia) in June; another of a suite from the music for his ballet The Minotaur, played by Howard Hanson and the Eastman-Rochester Symphony Orchestra, has just been released (by Mercury); and the Louisville Orchestra this week recorded his imposing new Variations for Orchestra...
Skulking, Swirling, Staggering. Carter's works, old and new, are written uncompromisingly in the counterpoint of dissonance and paced by skulking, staggering, swirling rhythms. The Minotaur (1946) throws listeners into an unnerving, outworldish mood with its first heavy notes, seems to approach every sound with a fresh attitude as the music tumbles along. The Quartet (1951), though far less accommodating, manages to achieve a satisfying interplay of tension and repose while carrying a quadrilogue at four different tempos simultaneously. High point is the slow movement, with a serene duo that floats calmly past the violent thrusts of the other...
...woman's sharp eye for gesture and the shape and condition of others' clothes and faces. In between the dilemmas and existentialist mazes, there is a great tragicomic talent at work, and readers who fail to take a pass or two at Murdoch's Minotaur will miss some fine and frenzied...