Word: modernists
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Love at First Sound. A modernist who was grounded in classical techniques, Schuman never strayed into the far-out realms of atonality or mechanical idiosyncrasies. His serious musical education started late, but he learned fast. As a boy on Manhattan's upper West Side, Schuman was totally uninterested in anything long-haired. He had a passing fling with jazz, played the banjo and the violin in a jazz band he formed in high school, and wrote, with Frank Loesser, such pop songs as In Love with the Memory of You. Baseball was his enduring passion: "Had I been...
Headed by Clarinetist Bill Smith and Pianist Johnny Eaton, the Jazz Ensemble prides itself on being "bilingual," e.g., mixing cool jazz with rigorously difficult modernist works by Roger Sessions, Darius Milhaud, Eaton himself. Whatever it plays, the ensemble likes to force its instruments to their outer limits. When at tacking modernist music, Eaton, for instance, favors dissonant jumps from one end of the keyboard to the other, violently plucks at the piano's innards to get a harp effect. Smith has developed a technique of aiming his clarinet directly at the piano strings to create weird and ghostly harmonics...
Difficult though it may be, the quartet that the long-suffering Ojai (Calif.) Festival audience heard last week has proved to be one of the most successful of modernist chamber works. At last week's UNESCO-sponsored International Rostrum of Composers in Paris, it was voted the outstanding musical work of the season. Winner of Pulitzer Prize and of the 1961 New York Music Critics Circle award, it has been recorded (by RCA Victor) and in the single year since its premiere, it has been played at most of the major European festivals. In various program notes around...
...Ojai's festival director, Composer Lukas Foss,the Second String Quartet is not only "not easy" but also "rather astonishing-an opinion shared by most people who have heard it. The astonishment derives in part from the fact that Modernist Composer Carter treats his four instruments as individuals with "individual behavior patterns." The first violin is fantastic, ornate and mercurial," while he second violin is "laconic and orderly " the viola merely "expressive." and the cello "somewhat impetuous...
...opera's hero sings flat on his belly). With the composer and his wife themselves adapting the tale, the entire effort seems to have been embarrassing and painful to Prokofiev. As he had promised, he did weave a number of tuneful folk motifs into his usual sophisticated, modernist composition, even included a vintage Red army marching song. But the composer seemed somehow unable to conceal his treasonable pessimism and basic disbelief in the opera. When his hospitalized hero grabs a nurse and gaily dances on artificial legs to prove to doctors his fitness for combat, the music is merely...