Word: scherzo
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...this ostinato element performed according to the markings--elsewhere, these repeated notes were articulated in a smooth, 'lyrical' way. Thus the movement was robbed of both the intended contrast of the alternating elements, and the overall unity inherent in similarly-executed repetitions of the rhythmic ostinato figure. The scherzo, marked presto, was played too slowly to bring off the abundant rustic humor, while the trio, undoubtedly intended to be the lightest moment in this quartet, became a curiously contemplative "solo" for first violinist Shmuel Ashkenasi. In the final movement, Haydn employs the admittedly questionable device of recapitulating in the parallel...
...critics heard in it only a concertinos, amorphous confusion, when in fact it is the employment of the disparate images simultaneously resident in man's psychological existence tat informs the work with the sophistication which, if misjudged, seems like chaos. The first movement portrays the awakening of nature, the Scherzo is a boisterous landler based on first movement themes, the slow movement is a generally cheerful sylvan cortege in which forest animals, according to Mahler's expressed program, playfully bear the body of a dead hunter to his long-prepared grave, and the last movement alternates between heaven...
PARODY is at one irreverent and nostalgic; it cannot admit bitterness for it is essentially positive, calling attention to traduced ideals. When Mahler states a theme in the minor immediately after the major, or transforms a funeral march or song of anxiety into a waltz or scherzo, he is not saying, I believe, that life is little more than the distortion of the beautiful and pristine, but rather that irony is the tissue of man's life. His starkly juxtaposed Use of diatonicism and chromaticism prefigured the expressionists, especially Berg, who sought to express musically the complex of radically differentiated...
Allen Shawn's Song on a text by Maikov seemed a poor work obliterated by unacceptable singing. The piece consisted largely of a tawdry Dello Joio scherzo but provided neither beauty nor interest. It was especially unsuccessful in the registration and duration of its vowels...
...brassy claptrap and woolly woodwind shrieks which feed the voracious football band. In the face of this surging ocean of treacle stand a handful of superb works for wind, three of which--Stravinsky's L'Histoire du Soldat and Octet, and Gustav Holst's Hammer-smith: Prelude and Scherzo--were performed by the newly organized and intensely promising Harvard Wind Ensemble...