Word: musicologists
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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John Vincent: Quartet No. 1 (American Art Quartet; Contemporary). A remarkably cheerful and melodious score, written in 1936 by a gifted but little-known California composer and musicologist. Its four movements are all composed in Greek modes, in a smooth, facile style. Composer Vincent's direction seems apparent in this quartet, but he never quite seems to arrive at a destination...
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...
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...