Word: modernizations
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...last visit to Harvard was in 1956, when he gave the Charles Norton Eliot Lectures (or non-lectures, as he preferred to call them). They described his early life, his education at Harvard, and certain of his views on aesthetics and modern poetry...
...Nothing strikes me as more futile than to become a little Stravinsky or a little Bartok. I have tried, just as Stravinsky and Bartok have done, to make a purely personal synthesis of the musical teachings of the past." Thompson is no conservative, however. He says quite firmly that, "Modern music and, specifically, atonal composition seems to me to be a logical development from the experimentation of Wagner and Strauss. After all there are many passages in Wagner where there is extended tonal ambiguity. From this, it is just a small step before one asks, as Schoenberg...
...Thompson's favorite points about modern music concerns contemporary sophistication. "Despite the heroic attempts for sublimity in the Berg Concerto, contemporary idioms in general lend themselves only with great difficulty to anything approaching the sublime. After all, though a tinkle-tinkle here and there in a Webern score may satiate one's thirst for the piquant and highly flavored, it does not quench the far more important thirst of the soul. Elevated feeling in the human spirit is generally ignored by modern composers, but it is an important response to the musical art. Any thinking person who made a list...
...Thompson's patrons was Serge Koussevitsky who, for so many modern American composers, was a source of both income and inspiration. Koussevitsky, Thompson recalls, "had a genius for challenging you into writing a work. It was at his insistance that I composed, on extremely short notice, a chorus for all the students at Tanglewood to sing at the festival's dedication in 1940. He made it sound like the most important commission ever offered a composer...
...Modern Spanish-American Literature," taught by Raimundo Lida, professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, is one of the three new Spanish courses for 1959-60. The Department will also offer "The Enlightenment in Hispanic Literature," with emphasis on Feijoo, Cadalse, and Jovellano; and readings in "Unamuno and Ortega Y Gasset." A seminar on readings in Galdos, which was dropped from the catalogue in 1956, has been reinstated...