Word: nineteenth
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...heart of the composer's predicament is the problem of what to do with his inheritance from the nineteenth century and the last few hundred years of Western music in general. How much shall he keep, and how shall he replace what he discards? If he decides to preserve tonality (which might be defined briefly as a system in which one tone, or a chord built on that tone, acts as a sort of aural home base) he has the advantage of manipulating the vocabulary of musical relations and tensions with which most of us are familiar since we have...
...suggested that further changes were necessary; twelve-tone music needed a language of its own--not one borrowed from a previous system. The solution was not to be found by Schoenberg's famous pupil, Berg, who frequently used tonality, and whose arch-romantic operas stand far closer to the nineteenth century than to Berg's twelve-tone colleagues. In time it became clear that the major influence on the succeeding generation of twelve-tone writers was Anton Webern, another Schoenberg pupil who has been the subject of a major renaissance in the past few years...
...called Gertrude his ideal student. She participated animatedly in his seminars, as well as in those of George Santayana, who gave her new reading in the English philosophers. Other subjects she took included history, modern languages, mathematics, physics, chemistry, and zoology. "I came out of the nineteenth century," she wrote, "you had to be interested in evolution. I liked thinking.... I liked looking at everyone and talking and listening...
...size him up, cleverly tossed in the requisite bons mots and deliciously designated one of his characters "Fabrice." (Who could ever forget La Chartreuse de Parme!) That the piece was a hopeless tangle of words strewn in a thousand directions, indeed, that few could or would understand its nineteenth century affectations, mattered little. There was a beauty in words...
...unimportant, they feel, when set alongside the "principles" at stake. Greeks are puzzled and hurt that Americans do not always see it the same way; and the extent to which they conceive of America as standing for principle is almost frightening. Their image of the U.S. is really a nineteenth-century one--we are still, above all, a country dedicated to "the ideals of '76," still the land of opportunity for the downtrodden of Europe. These words have a distinctly embarrassing ring in the ears of many Americans; and it is an interesting comment on the U.S. today that foreigners...