Word: musication
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...most recent concerts-last week at Philadelphia's Academy of Music, the week before at Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art* Nina and her audiences have connected early on, and it has been a ball all the way. She has danced around her piano once or twice to prove it. For their part, the audiences have greeted her message things with complete concurrence, as well as applause and standing ovations...
...Music," as Mr. Kirchner said, "is being lobotomized by cultural stupidity." America, with her genius for suffocating within immense borders, has produced very little great music because she strains so furiously to produce it. Now that her artists have finally ceased rummaging through European dustbins, they find themselves in an unnaturally in-hospitable culture. Our leaders are hostile, our people consumptive, our arts enslaved. President Nixon's musical tastes range from a memorable arrangement of America the Beautiful for forty oil drums, to the Inaugural performance of All We Like Sheep by that otiose organ of musical dyspepsia, the Mormon...
...experiencing an exhilarating mid-century suspicion of our cultural inheritance. This attitude of critical activity is not a decline into functionalism but the discovery of a new quality of integrity. "Music," as Roger Sessions remarked in his opening lecture, "is to be judged on its own merits, however slowly they reveal themselves. . . . The criteria is authenticity and immediacy in regard to experience." Some way out of our present musical somnambula must be found. "The world," feels Mr. Kirchner, "needs shock treatment; this is the role of the avant-garde. It is sacrificial, self-immolating." The purpose of such...
...MUSIC is moving into a more pungent commerce with the particulars of life. And cries of anarchy are beside the point. Anarchy is rapid evolution misperceived as chaos. Artists such as John Cage or Lukas Foss create through their irreverance. Their improvisatory music suggests that the entire aural material of man's sensible life is exquisite and repulsive music, according to the mental inflection one lends...
...Music is the sensitized constancy of the world's noises. The most difficult problem of any art is to progress without replacing one set of arbitrary conventions with another set. The avant-garde, in attempting to solve this problem, is generating fresh breezes across the face of music. And when their successes and failures are recognized, young people will no longer approach classical music through Beatle allusions and electric disembowelments; they will come to music as the most sensitive come to a film by Godard or Bunuel, because they must, because they wish to speak...