Word: sermonizer
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Metaphysical Blackout. Beckett's friend and mentor, James Joyce, once said: "Here is life without God. Just look at it!" In a way, Beckett's entire work is an agonized sermon on that text. In his world, the machinery of existence seems to be grinding to a halt. The titles Krapp's Last Tape, Endgame and Malone Dies suggest a civilization with terminal cancer. The suffocating womb becomes a death trap: the urns encasing the characters in Play, the mound of earth piled up to the heroine's neck in Happy Days, the ashcans of Endgame...
...much less provocative than the contemporary experiments of Hindemith, Bartok, Schoenberg, and Cowell. The Movements, however, a strictly twelve-tone piece, is characterized by pellucid, crystalline registration, pointillistic rhythmical control, and Stravinsky's unique unsentimental lvricism. This work linked Threni and Agon (1956), a supreme masterpiece, to the later Sermon, Narrative and a Prayer and The Flood, Movements makes clear once for all that serial composition is not necessarily a constricting system available to uninspired journeymen, but a pregnant and energizing compositional discipline in the hands of a master such as Schoenberg, Berg, or Stravinsky. Mrs. Vosgerchian played the piece...
...subscribed to what he called "the sacredness and possibilities" of humans and he impressively preached a religion that linked the two without obscurantism. One who heard him was Ivy Lee, the father of the public relations industry and adviser to the Rockefeller family. Lee published Fosdick's 1922 sermon under the title of "The New Knowledge and the Christian Faith," and arranged to have it and subsequent homilies widely distributed. When John D. Rockefeller Jr. offered Fosdick the pulpit at the fashionable Park Avenue Baptist Church in 1925, the controversial preacher at first refused. "I do not want...
...radio series. Fosdick's eloquent "life-situation preaching," which incisively related modern theology to everyday situations, was hardly spontaneous. He shut himself off from callers each day to compose his highly literate discourses replete even with articulate jokes that friends called "Fosdickettes." As he observed: "A last-minute sermon preparer is not doing a good job or giving the congregation what it deserves...
...Paul and Mary's Blowin' in the Wind underscored film clips of student demonstrations. The overall theme was Pete Seeger's Turn, Turn, Turn. The program marked what might possibly be a new pattern for TV news documentaries: except for a final three-minute, 40-second sermon from David Brinkley (in which he credited the entire decade to TV), there were no formula interviews, no ponderous philosophizing. Instead, it was a documentary full of flash and color, exciting the senses by inundating them with sights and sounds...