Word: phantasmagoria
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Arnold Schoenberg's String Trio, Opus 45, has extraordinary strength and spaciousness of sonority to widen this composer's usual sphere of unfiled phantasmagoria. It taxes the strings, quite successfully, to the hilt, with truncated, screeching tremolos, portamentos, and sounds produced with the back of the bow. But the more familiar this listener becomes with Schoenberg's devices, the less is he able to be content with the sheer magnificent discoveries of sounds, and the more is he confirmed in his preconception that a work of art demands by nature a connecting tissue alien to Schoenberg's methods...
Other Soviet-style billingsgate: "Foulest of words . . . ancient and hackneyed gossip ... phantasmagoria of phrases . . . delirium of an impudent person . mercenary from head to heels . . . this savage . . . bandit . . depraved souls . . . product of the Stock Exchange and black market . . . scum. . . . How can you influence him? Such persons are not even beaten, so as not to stain one's hands...
Author Barzun has little indeed to say about Education, i.e., the vast, vague "phantasmagoria," the "sulphur-and-brimstone nebula," the "overheated Utopia" that is popularly expected to "make the City of God out of Public School No. 26." But about Teaching he says plenty. His brisk, irreverent, earnest book will ventilate a good many stuffy rooms in the U.S. schoolhouse...
Here is a truly extraordinary book, a one-man five-ring verbal circus, a phantasmagoria of wit, satire, irony, invective, diatribe, rhetoric, and pulpit oratory. The style is variously compounded of elements from Sterne, Carlyle, Swift, H. L. Mencken, and the book of Jeremiah. Yet, appearing now at a time of national introspection and moral house-cleaning, it should be a valuable book, entirely aside from its qualities as pure entertainment. Wylie claims to have been breathing the same brand of fire for the last twenty or so years, predicting the future importance of bombing and the black-hearted intentions...
...Polish artist Feliks Topolski, whom George Bernard Shaw has called "perhaps the greatest of all impressionists in black & white," will shortly leave England for Gibraltar, Africa, Persia and India to continue drawing and painting the "entire phantasmagoria" of World War II. FORTUNE for January contains a ten-page portfolio of Topolski's masterly impressions of U.S. troops in Britain and Northern Ireland...