Word: rolls
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Unforgettable Exordium. The program opens with a roll of drums and a dashing fanfare of twelve trumpets that ends in a sad plop. The fanfare is followed by Composer Malcolm Arnold's A Grand Grand Overture, dedicated to "President Hoover" (says the program note: "The momentous opening-the beginning of an introduction that is to contain the foreshadowings of all the principal thematic material-is among the unforgettable exordiums of music, echoing, as it does, what might be called the elemental power of the ethos of sublimity . . ."). The Overture is scored for "a prodigious array of percussion, pitched...
Hose in the Horns. Other selections: a concerto in which the piano soloist is under the impression that he is supposed to be playing Grieg, while the conductor is concentrating on Tchaikovsky and the orchestra is working on Roll Out the Barrel; a second concerto, written by Mozart's father Leopold for alpenhorn and played on two lengths of garden hose by Britain's distinguished Hornist Dennis Brain; a set of variations for wheezy winds, featuring Hoffnung himself playing a tuba so big that it runs on wheels and requires built-in bellows to supply enough wind...
...Socialist hootenanny in the St. Pan-eras town hall, Statesman Gaitskell cavorted like a regular chap, hurled himself with abandon into a rock 'n' roll session...
Into umbrous, ill-ventilated underground caverns, seemingly as necessary to life as the air-raid shelters where some of the visitors were born, thousands of bemused young Londoners squeeze nightly to stomp and holler their approval of Britain's latest musical mania: U.S. rock 'n' roll, commercial hillbilly and folk music, warmed over and juiced up in a mishmash called skiffle...
...congress with a surefire blast at the West. Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera, he remarked, is housed in an "old, dirty, worm-eaten, leaky building," dependent upon artists from West Germany, Italy and France. Furthermore, "all those insane, nervous 'boogie woogies' and 'rock 'n' roll' are like some kind of wild cavemen's orgies...