Word: musicologist
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...climaxes its eleven-month season by presenting church performances of two 12th cen-tury music dramas, The Play of Daniel and The Play of Herod. Staged and costumed in period style, these productions unfold in vocal chants and instrumental passages of austere elegance and moving simplicity. White, 43, a musicologist and harpsichordist who took over the Pro Musica after Founder Noah Greenberg died in 1966, has no intention of abandoning such efforts. In fact he plans more: the group will soon start rehearsals for a production of Jacopo Peri's 1600 opera Euridice, the earliest opera for which...
...fact, he adds, the Beatles' haunting composition, She's Leaving Home-one of twelve songs in the Sgt. Pepper album-"is equal to any song that Schubert ever wrote." Conductor Leon ard Bernstein's appreciation is just as high; he cites Schumann. As Musicologist Henry Pleasants says: "The Beatles are where music is right...
...when you talk about the Beatles, you mostly mean John Lennon and Paul McCartney, who write nearly all the words and tunes, and producer George Martin, who writes the rest of what you hear on the record. Martin knows all the musical technique anyone will ever need: as a musicologist, he has at is command every classical trick in the book, as a record producer, he knows how to make piano strings sound like the winds of Hell. He can conjure up anything the Beatles call for, and he is responsible for many of the "wee bits" in Sgt. Pepper...
...attractive and irresistible.' It sets a mood, and this applies especially to those who doubt their powers and attractiveness." Cellists woo too, by the way they hug their female-shaped cellos. This is healthier, suggests Greenson, because the "cello is more of a grown-up figure, yet passive." Musicologist Dorothy Bales sees the struggle of the string players as "a need to put the self together-to join the yang and yin of their personality. They try to do this by coordinating their right arm with their left." Like all artists, she says, musicians are "a combination...
Slurs & Shakes. The history of bel canto and the reasons for its revival are chronicled in a lively new book by Musicologist Henry Pleasants, The Great Singers (Simon & Schuster; $7.50). The first prima donnas of bel canto were not donnas at all but male sopranos and contraltos. These castrati, who commanded the center stage of opera for more than 100 years, until the end of the 18th century, constituted about 70% of all male singers. They postured and strutted on the stage like peacocks improvising elaborate vocal filigrees, inserting grace notes or unaccompanied passages, some of which lasted as long...