Word: music
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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PERHAPS ONCE in a season a concert presents a program which, regardless of the quality of the performance, lays bare with an unconscious genius the morphology of the musical art. The Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra's concert of last Friday evening did just that. The program of Webern's Six Pieces, Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, and Bartok's Violin Concerto was not just another variation of the workhorse-standard esoterica-classic modernist admixture. It penetrated the analytic encrustation of ten thousand musicologists, from the turbid intellectualism of Boulez to the ornithological rhapsodizing of Messeian to the volcanic dogmatism...
...usual assumption is that Schonberg rescued music from its careening plunge into the decadence of diatonic gigantism by his systematic formulation of the liberating discipline of dodecaphony. People tend to divide into apostles of either Schonberg-the-Savior or Schonberg-the-Antichrist. And so the apostolic succession of innovative geniuses passed from Bach to Beethoven to Wagner to Schonberg (or the Devil) and then to sleep. The common antinomy sets Schonberg against Stravinsky, coalescing all music into two schools in a priceless display of Manichaean passion. Schonberg is seen as the seminal prime mover, and Stravinsky [and to a lesser...
WITH singular integrity the Cambridge Society for Early Music last Wednesday evening avoided the institutionalized classics of antiquity, particularly those Interesting Historical Figures Palestrina, Monteverdi and Gabrieli, to present two pivotal and masterful liturgical compositions. These were the Musikalische Exequien (1636) of Heinrich Schutz, and the Vesperae de Dominica (1779) of Mozart. The first work was instrumental in transferring musical hegemony from Italy to Germany, while the Mozart work illustrates that composer's bursting maturity, a maturity which would soon reach its highest achievement in his church music with the great unfinished Mass in C minor...
Schutz, who was born into the world of Shakespeare and Cervantes and died in the world of Corneille and Racine, was the greatest German composer before Bach. His surpassing importance as one of music's choral masters is exceeded only by his inexplicable anonymity. He absorbed the colossal Baroque style of Giovanni Gabrieli as well as the audacious innovations of Monteverdi, both Schutz's contemporaries and teachers, to forge a colorfully formal, intensely spiritual, quietly progressive style. In its unorthodox form, the Exequien looks forward to the cantatas of Bach and the oratorios of Handel. The work is characterized...
Star--Despite wonderful music, ranging from Kurt Weill to Cole Porter, an aimless, fruitless movie. The theatrical history, however, is fun, and Julie Andrews and Daniel Massey are likewise as Gertrude Lawrence and Noel Coward. At the GARY, 131 Stuart...