Word: musicologist
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Nicolas Slonimsky is a Boston composer and musicologist who long ago reached a firm conclusion about music critics: they have always had trouble getting used to new music. Scholar Slonimsky's further conclusion: modern critics are not nearly so vituperative about their dislikes as the oldtimers used...
...fellow students, Musicologist Slonimsky has catalogued his findings in a 30-page "Invecticon," listing the strongest and most piquant critical epithets alphabetically, with composers to whom they have been applied. Samples: advanced cat music (Wagner), belly-rumbling (Bela Bartok), bestial outcries (Alban Berg), bleary-eyed paresis (Tchaikovsky), chaos (Bartok, Berg, Berlioz, Brahms, Liszt, Mussorgsky, Prokofiev, Scriabin, Strauss, Wagner), intoxicated woodpecker (Edgar Varèse), lewd caterwauling (Wagner), mass-snoring (Bartok), nasty little noise (Debussy), spring fever in a zoo (Stravinsky...
Author Griffin writes in the first person in diary form. His hero is a young American musicologist in France who arrives at a Benedictine monastery to study Gregorian chant. Author Griffin did the same thing, admits that Devil is at least an "intellectual history." His hero is no Roman Catholic, but by the rules of the order he must live as a monk so long as he stays at the monastery. This is not easy. His unheated stone cell is bitterly cold, the food is execrable, and he must share such work as cleaning the primitive lavatories. Moreover, his brain...
When, after another illness, the musicologist moves into the town, Devil concentrates on life outside the walls. Now the assorted evils of everyday life in the world are seen in contrast to monkish goodness. Truly the devil rides outside, where spite, greed, hatred (and again & again sexual temptation) plague and disgust the hero...
...crude, awkward and febrile as it is-The Devil Rides Outside is kept bowling along by pure writing steam. It is often repetitive and frequently staggers to a stop, but it is saved each time by a fresh burst of vigor and intensity. At novel's end the musicologist returns to the monastery, and there is the promise that he will find God and inner peace. Author Griffin did not go back to a monastery. He chose a 40-acre farm instead. But the act of writing Devil led to a change of church. Once an Episcopalian, Griffin...