Word: orchestra
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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Serge Koussevitzky, brilliant, provocative conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra startled conservative ears last week when he gave the mad, barbaric incantation of Prokofiev's "Sept, Us sont sept"* its first and its second performance in Manhattan. For, having played the feverish chant in which the shattering tenor voice of the priest screams in frenzy to the seven horrible demons of Akkadian legend against a background of a surging, fanatical chorus as the third number on his program, he repeated it as the fifth for the better understanding of the audience...
Last week, Conductor Koussevitzky again startled. He accepted for performance next month by his orchestra, "Flivver 10,000,000," subtitled "A Joyous Epic." The opening prologue of this ultramodern symphonic cycle by Frederic S. Converse is "Dawn in Detroit." Of the life of a Ford, Composer Converse then writes, of its building, its romance by the roadside, its collisions, rattlings, wheezings...
Last week in Manhattan, a dubious audience strained expectant ears, saw musical instruments, were invited to hear musical tones, which most of them had never dreamed existed. On the stage of Carnegie Hall, Leopold Stokowski, able conductor, master of the unexpected, stood in command before the Philadelphia Orchestra, presented Julian Carillo's† "System of the 13th Sound." Concertgoers, bred in a world where the finest division of music is the halftone, in which the chromatic scale has a total of twelve tones to the octave, heard, or tried to hear, quarter-tones, eighth-tones, three-quarter-tones...
Through the two movements of Mr. Carillo's Concertino Mr. Stokowski led the orchestra into strange and subtle effects of fractional tone. Of the audience, some saw prospects of infinite, new subtleties of music; many found their ears too coarse for the 96-tone octave, only heard slightly distorted semi-tones...
...Carillo, able Mexican composer of ultra-modern music, first presented his system through the League of Composers at the Town Hall, Manhattan, March 13, 1926. Last week's performance, was the first time his work has been actively endorsed by a leading Symphony Orchestra, was the first presentation of his ideas in a work of symphonic scope...