Word: motif
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...background music for the film's climactic military parade in Tel Aviv, they had hit on an RCA Victor recording by Arthur Fiedler of T. M. Carter's Boston Commandery March. What they did not know was that Composer Carter had used Onward, Christian Soldiers as his motif. The studio quickly pointed out that there are some Christian soldiers in the Israeli army (said one film maker: "We are a democratic country"), but a further check only increased their embarrassment: not a single Christian, they learned, had marched onward in the Tel Aviv parade...
David Landon's three poems, all partaking of the dominant love motif, are slightly more complex. The best, "Quattrocento," is cleverly constructed and involves some striking visual imagery. "Beneath a Sky" is not as well developed as the others: its images are forced, its phrases turgid, and the adjective "fishy-stinking" is enough to make any reader stop right there...
Though there are some eddies of eccentricity among a few designers, e.g., evening dresses with a "hula hoop'' motif, all the big houses have done their best to please the women who last year looked boxy and sexless in sack dresses-and complained about it so loudly that the new trend in bathing suits is the Italian bikini...
...less knowing than Picasso. There have been artists who recognized in the forms of these figures, masks and fetishes, a display of rhythms, colors, and impulses universal in nature, and who identified with it and drew from it. But there have been others eager to exploit the primitive motif rather than enrich their work with the deeper currents of primitive expression. Many of these have been commercialists rather than painters qua artist, and they haven't done the real article much good...
Cabled a TIME correspondent from the Brussels opening: "The audience applauded mightily, but the work had moments rather than momentum. The music consisted of only a few themes linked by weak chains. One motif-that of romantic love-was warm, sweet and haunting. And occasionally voices rose in skillful counterpoint. There were echoes of Puccini-one was tempted, as a Belgian critic put it, to shout at Menotti: 'All right then, simply sing like Puccini...