Word: mozarts
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Huntington Avenue, Mozart's music - the play of its light and intelligence, its frolic and clarity - fills a theater packed with young people. It is a Boston University student production of "The Marriage of Figaro," done in Italian, "Le Nozze de Figaro," the full four acts, uncut, lasting almost four hours. It seems like half an hour. The lovely production could be moved to the stage of the Metropolitan Opera without much apology or revision...
...youth and talent of the performers that makes the evening so moving - and the immense, concentrated hard work that went to stage "Figaro"'s bright silliness. Mozart's late-18th-century opera flows from the mouths and instruments (violins, cellos, flutes, oboes, clarinets, horns, trumpets, timpani) of early-21st-century students, fresh and young. They put dew on the music of another young man, long dead, and roses in its notes...
...theory of the vertical and the horizontal runs as follows: Mozart comes down to us vertically through time, renewed from one generation to the next, and passed on as an item of permanent worth. Culture likes to work on the vertical axis, by accumulating tradition. About 35 years ago, however, we pivoted around to the horizontal. Culture, instead of being passed down vertically through time, began to move along instead on a vast frothing horizontal, across the generation - a great wave advancing on a broad front and transmitting a popular culture about 15 minutes deep: a shallow, throwaway, universal culture...
...been said that listening to Mozart makes you smarter, that something in the musical patterns stimulates intelligence. The author Stefan Kanfer proposes a counter-theory, which he calls the "Trazom Effect," after Mozart spelled backward. Kanfer's idea is that listening to certain people, or ideas, or music, can make a person dangerously stupid. The Trazom Effect is at work up and down the pop-cultural horizontal on which we live...
...racism is the thread that binds Jazz together with his previous large-scale work. He and his onscreen docents, like trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and the critics Gary Giddins and Stanley Crouch, easily weave the story of the music not only together with history but also with conventional cultural tradition. Mozart and Shakespeare are cited as cultural touchstones for the giants of jazz; the narration refers to Ellington as "America's greatest composer," an accolade that may well be deserved but which even the Duke might have found, however satisfying, a little exclusionary...