Word: palestrina
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Larousse Encyclopedia of Music. Edited by Geoffrey Hindley. 576 pages. World. $19.95. A potpourri of minstrels and melody that manages to make the songs of old Provence seem as delectable as poulet a la proven∧ale. So too with musical greats from Palestrina and Purcell to Wagner and Webern, in a handsome treatise that is informed and comfortably free of jargon. This is primarily history, not a quick alphabetical reference aid (readers wanting that should try the Oxford Companion to Music). The knowing may regret the cursory treatment of American music and wonder, say, why Stravinsky and Berlioz...
STILL SEEKING that ineffable moment. I attended the risorgimiento of the Harvard Glee Club in the annual Harvard-Yale concert. The Yale group began with a thin version of Palestrina's Supplicationes for main chorus and responsive small choir (which joined me in the Tibetan heights of the upper balcony) and proceeded to good performances of Holst's delightful Blacksmith Song and Dowland's beautiful Come Again, Sweet Love. Their part closed with a stupendously tedious arrangement by Fenno Heath of Donne's Death Be Not Proud. The Harvard Glee Club performed a less interesting program except for a mildly...
WITH singular integrity the Cambridge Society for Early Music last Wednesday evening avoided the institutionalized classics of antiquity, particularly those Interesting Historical Figures Palestrina, Monteverdi and Gabrieli, to present two pivotal and masterful liturgical compositions. These were the Musikalische Exequien (1636) of Heinrich Schutz, and the Vesperae de Dominica (1779) of Mozart. The first work was instrumental in transferring musical hegemony from Italy to Germany, while the Mozart work illustrates that composer's bursting maturity, a maturity which would soon reach its highest achievement in his church music with the great unfinished Mass in C minor...
Died. John Finley Williamson, 76, founder of the Westminster Choir College in Princeton, N.J., whose aim was to restore to choral music the prestige it enjoyed in the days of Palestrina and Bach, over 40 years built one of the most highly respected choirs in the U.S., saw his students create carbon-copy "Westminster Choirs" in such faraway lands as Japan and India; of a heart attack; in Toledo...
Belaboring a program of music or a musical organization for contributing to cultural inertia is dangerous because so much depends on one's own center of gravity in musical history. If, for examble, one feels most at home anywhere between Palestrina and Mahler, then the programs of the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra this season were daring--chronologically, at least. They included works of Giannini, Kodaly, Hindemith, Bartok, Martin, and, on Friday's program, Charles Griffes and Alfredo Ginastera. But if one's scope extends to twentieth century musical ideas and materials, beyond mere rehashings of established techniques, then...