Word: musication
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...circle of party chatterers rather than make small talk. When he emerges from the wings to perform, it is not with the elegant stride of a Milstein or the open-armed warmth of a Stern. It is with a rapid, open-toed, Chaplinesque shuffle. When Zukofsky plays, his music often consists of a series of brash scrapes, sharp squeaks and galloping glissandos that Mozart, Brahms and Tchaikovsky never dreamed of. Sometimes, it seems that he is a man who cares little for the usual trappings of success...
...fact, Paul Zukofsky is the foremost interpreter of contemporary violin music in the U.S. today. At 25, he indeed cares a great deal about success, except that he has chosen to pursue it in the challenging and unpredictable world of new music rather than in the classics. He need not have done so. His flawless technique and singing interpretative style would have been enough to rank him with any of his contemporaries in the safe world of traditional concert life. But while Zukofsky can, and does, play the classics, he sees himself as a latter-day Liszt, introducing the music...
...standards, even Stravinsky and Bartok are somewhat old hat. "The tradition that I am upholding is the tradition of the continuance of music," he says. He has introduced new works by Milton Babbitt and Krzysztof Penderecki to the U.S., revived neglected ones by Charles Ives and Ferruccio Busoni. Zukofsky's 1968 recording of Roger Sessions' Violin Concerto proved that the music was not only playable, which many a violinist had denied, but that it was perhaps the finest concerto for the instrument ever produced by an American composer...
...parents had stopped sending their prodigy to school after the first grade, partly because they felt they could do a better job tutoring him themselves. They did. At 13, Paul won a New York City high school equivalency diploma. At 14, he entered Manhattan's Juilliard School of Music. By the time he was 17, he had played three major recitals in Carnegie Hall. At 20, he received his Master's degree from Juilliard. He is now working on his Ph.D. and writing a treatise on contemporary violin technique...
Modern technology has spawned a new kind of instrument maker. The old craftsmen of music worked with wood, strings and valves; the new ones hook up wires, transistors and wave generators. The sounds the new products make are not echoes of the human voice but a bizarre collection of buzzes, bleeps and squawks. Nonetheless, the men responsible for them are the potential Stradivaris and Steinways of electronic music, and their forbiddingly complex instruments are made for the musicians of the future-who are destined to be as much composer-technicians as performers...