Word: music
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...really is meaningless." It is also troublesome, since it requires them constantly to prowl the pawnshops in search of cheap replacements for broken instruments. "We started using it," says Townshend, "as a lever to get the audiences to come, and then, we hoped, dig the rest of the music." Now the audiences are coming. The Who rank close behind the Beatles and the Rolling Stones as one of England's leading rock groups, and they are rapidly winning frenzied admirers in America as well. Still, the music seems overshadowed by the violence...
...Shankar also proved something else: that Indian music means a lot more than just the sitar and its familiar partners, the two-drum tabla and the string-drone tamboura. Indian music has its origins in Vedic hymns that date back 2,000 years. Indians have always believed that music has the power to change human destiny. Their sacred chants had to be intoned just so; a mistake could ruin everything. Thus, if Vocalist Jitendra Abhisheki seemed ner vous as he came out for a selection of Vedic chants, it was understandable. But his nasal, three-note invocation to Saraswati, goddess...
...addition to vocal music, Shankar presented ten masters of strange-sounding wind and percussion instruments-the sarod, santoor, shehnai, sarangi, mri-dangam and venu. It was a first of sorts when the players all padded onstage to perform Shankar's ensemble piece, V-7½, a vigorous ten-minute raga played at a tricky 7½ beats to the bar. It was also the first time that so many Indian musicians had been seen west of Bombay on one Oriental...
Shankar's display of musical hypnotism clearly dramatized the essential difference between Western and Indian music. Much of Western music is an ex pressive artistic message delivered-as if in a package-directly to the listener. Indian music attempts to induce a loftier, more profound emotional and spiritual state in the listener through a steady, stroboscopic kind of rhythmic and melodic bedazzlement. At the height of a raga, says Shankar, "it is utter joy, uninhibited, that an artist experiences. The raga, the musician, the listeners, all become one." That is something that India's Ravi Shankar...
Last week the first recording of the concerto was issued on the Melodyia Angel label. The music should prove as much of a surprise to Shostakovich's fans as to his critics. Gone are the characteristic hard-edged rhythms, brittle orchestral sounds and prankish grotesqueries. Instead, the bad boy of Russian music seems to have found a new mood of lyrical quiet and contentment. His artistic debt to Sergei Prokofiev is as clear as ever-embarrassingly so at times-and some of his melodic writing in the first movement is downright dull. But the elegiac sweep of the middle...