Word: music
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Soviet Union than in other nations because the vast size of the nation makes short-wave transmission the most practical way to reach the entire country. Perhaps as many as 30 million receivers are now in use, and listeners have become so fond of outside news and pop music (a recent headliner on the Voice of America: the Beatles' new album) that they are determined to stay tuned-if not to one station, then to another. By fiddling patiently with their dials, Russians overcome their government's effort to block the airwaves.* As one Soviet listener recently wrote...
Everything, that is, except the music, which looms far larger today than it did in Bach's own time. In 18th century Germany, Bach had a national reputation as a virtuoso organist. Yet as a composer, he attracted mostly condescending notice-even his son Johann Christian, one of the four Bach children who distinguished themselves as composers, referred to him as "the Old Wig." Today, of course, Bach is universally ranked among the transcendent creators of Western civilization. Choral works that he turned out for rowdy schoolboys to sing in drafty provincial churches are cherished by the world...
Even the creators of new music that points firmly away from Bach cannot escape him. He is too deeply embedded in the curriculum of music conservatories, and he towers too imposingly as an unrivaled craftsman. Polish Composer Krzysztof Penderecki, 35, acknowledges the continuity between Bach and his own St. Luke Passion (1966) by spelling out the master's name in a recurring cantus firmus: B flat, A, C, H (the German notation for B natural). Used by Bach himself in The Art of Fugue, the motif is a traditional tribute that has been paid by composers as diverse...
...eternal mystery is that an artist who seemed to his contemporaries so backward-looking should seem to his successors so forward-looking. Compared with Monteverdi or Beethoven or Schoenberg, he was not an innovator. Historically Bach's distinction was to summarize and culminate all the musical developments that led up to him. But he did this with such subtlety and daring, such piety and passion, that he ended up reconciling, completing and extending everything he touched, thereby preparing music for the centuries ahead. It has been said that the history of philosophy consists of a series of footnotes...
...proof, music lovers have only to look around them and listen this Christmas-in churches and concert halls, on campuses and in record stores, in homes and on the streets. Then they, too, can say with Frederick the Great: "Old Bach is here...