Word: popularizer
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Appalachian Spring, The Incredible Flutist, and Tender Land are all charming. The Tallis and Greensleeves fantasias, Young Person's Guide, Ceremony of Carols, and Spring Symphony are all exquisitely charming, irresistibly delicious. But I, for one, am slowly drowning in this unendurably "childlike" floodtide of syrup and sugarplums. The popular repertoire of English and American works is one great confectionery, a banquet of indigenous sweetmeats, a maddeningly luxurious dessert table from which the audiences can engorge marzipan and seraphim until prostrate from he sheer agreeableness...
...repertoire. Its decayed sweet tooth cannot be extracted by more sugar, and its delight in gratuitous perfumes cannot be disciplined by more profferments of dusty oleander. This never-ending recovery of "adolescence" and "national roots" on the part of Anglo-Saxon composers, their incessant celebration of the precious and popular, reaches an apotheosis of sorts when a British commentator asserts that Benjamen Britten's personality "does not show Stravinsky's uncomplicated sadomasochism, Schönberg's desexualization of music, or the naive barbarism of Bartok." There is really no answer to this kind of a chocolate-cream musicologist except...
...proceeds to an inner sanctum of the store, the shopper can look at even raunchier merchandise, including a dozen kinds of rubber phalli in varying sizes. According to the manager of the Stuttgart store, Beate's son Ulli, such Deutsche Wertarbeit (German quality workmanship) is particularly popular with French tourists...
...year 1692 was a very bad year for the town of Salem, Mass. During a summer of superstitious hysteria, grim events took place there that have permanently tarnished the popular American memory of its Puritan past. According to widely accepted tradition, the whole thing was whipped up by Cotton Mather and the lesser clergymen of a frowning theocracy. Before it was over, the story goes, 19 men and women were convicted and hanged as witches, and one man was pressed to death beneath large rocks for refusing to plead. The tradition holds that the executions were the result...
Clearing the Clergy. Such judgments, according to Chadwick Hansen, professor of American Studies at Penn State, are remarkably misleading. Beyond the fact that witchcraft trials resulted in 20 executions, he says, everything in the popular tradition is false. Far from inciting tragedy, the clergy "acted throughout as a restraint upon the proceedings and it was their misgivings which finally brought the trials to an end." (Clergymen had much influence but no office; the Bay Colony was no theocracy.) The afflicted girls, whose courtroom convulsions at the sight of the accused convinced the judges, were not spiteful exhibitionists, but felt themselves...