Word: modernist
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Salzedo turned to the harp itself, transformed its physical aspect by replacing the fussy gold with businesslike polished maple. Salzedo then experimented with compositions for the harp, made it into a versatile solo instrument. Says Modernist Composer Edgar Varese: "Carlos is an innovator, an adventurer. He has succeeded in changing the sex of the harp -minimizing its golden aura of Victorian femininity; he has discovered and explored its virility...
Arrival by Fluke. Composer Engel started his first opera, Alfred, when he was ten ("I spent a great deal of time block-lettering the title at the top of the score"), eventually won a graduate scholarship to Juilliard, studied composition with craggy Modernist Roger Sessions. He arrived on Broadway "purely by fluke" when he persuaded Melvyn Douglas to let him write new incidental music for a Broadway production of Sean O'Casey's Within the Gates. That was in 1934, and since then Composer-Conductor Engel has had a hand in such diverse Broadway shows as Maurice Evans...
...freshmen, America the Beautiful, Camptown Races, Turkey in the Straw). Then, turning to his orchestra, Bernstein whipped it through a fine performance, his hips swaying, his arms flinging wide in a characteristic expression of musical frenzy. A youthful work (1897-1901) by Connecticut's late, largely self-taught Modernist Ives (an insurance broker most of his active life), the symphony was, as Lennie remarked, "original, eccentric, naive and as full of charm as an old lace valentine." With his own special mixture of eloquence, charm and ham, Bernstein thus gave the Philharmonic an excitement that it has not known...
...heard a voice . . . say, A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny; and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine"). Hoover has something to add from his experience as food administrator in famine-stricken Europe after World War I: "Some modernist might surmise from his 'pair of scales' fixing the prices of barley and his conserving of 'oil and wine' that, in addition to being a symbol of famine, he also might have been a symbol of either a profiteer or a food administrator...
Darling Man. A brief period of study with Ravel in France only purified his English idiom, resulting in the moving Housman song cycle On Wenlock Edge. His rare ventures into modernist techniques left him uncertain; after the first performance of his war-troubled (1935) Symphony No. 4, he said, "I do not know whether I like it,-but it is what I meant." Several years later, after conducting it himself, he revised his opinion: "Well, gentlemen, if that's modern music, you can have...