Word: octet
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...steady accumulation of astoundingly vulgar pieces of brassy claptrap and woolly woodwind shrieks which feed the voracious football band. In the face of this surging ocean of treacle stand a handful of superb works for wind, three of which--Stravinsky's L'Histoire du Soldat and Octet, and Gustav Holst's Hammer-smith: Prelude and Scherzo--were performed by the newly organized and intensely promising Harvard Wind Ensemble...
...Octet is one of Stravinsky's most austere pieces, but is nevertheless a masterful enquiry into wind dialogue. The work exhibits Stravinsky's polyphonic terseness and lucidity, and particularly his severe economy of expression in which not a single note or beat is gratuitous excess. The Octet is a collection of crystalline inflections reflecting jewel-like through the mists of Strauss' Suite. Stravinsky is the greatest master of the liberating freshness of technical discipline since Bach. His pellucid textures are never subjected to the spoilage of superfluity but rather to an intensely self-conscious merging of the intoxication of original...
...Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, and Dvorak possess an unerring inner discrimination for the wind timbres and persuasion, while many other composers simply pay obligatory homage to the noisemakers with passages of stark, inhumane cacophony for the brass, or limpid, precious colorings for the woodwind. With such works as Soldat, Octet, Dumbarton Oaks, and Symphonies of Wind Instruments, Stravinsky is definitely a member of the former group. L'Histoire du Soldat (1918), a suite of elegant miniatures for seven players, was given a generally excellent reading under the direction of student conductor David Archibald. Mr. Archibald, although somewhat inhibited technically, maintained metrical...
...affair is intense; its emotions range from guilt and despair to real joy and momentary hope. Berryman attempts to involve the excellent lady in all of that intensity and emotional chaos. The guilt and self-effacement, he insists, should be shared as well as the joy; after an octet's abstract discussion of adultery and adulterers, then...
...even sharper departure from Big Beat banalities came as Tunesmith McCartney began exhibiting an unsuspected lyrical gift. In 1965, he crooned the loveliest of his ballads, Yesterday, to the accompaniment of a string octet-a novel and effective backing that gave birth to an entire new genre, baroque-rock. Still another form, raga-rock, had its origins after George Harrison flipped over Indian music, studied with Indian sitar Virtuoso Ravi Shankar, and introduced a brief sitar motif on the 1965 recording Norwegian Wood. Now everybody's making with the sitar...