Word: shaffers
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...Salieri of Peter Shaffer's play Amadeus, from which the film was adapted, sees the transcendent in Mozart's music, and, inevitably, the immanent in his own. And his own barrenness torments him. He despairs that he can only hear, and not create, the absolute music that flows from his rival's pen. In this sense, Amadeus is brutally relevant, as it engages the quintessentially post-modern problem of creative importence. More coherant and more powerful than the film it spawned, the play presents itself as a speculative exercise rather than a revisionist biography...
...Leverett House Arts Society production of Amadeus (directed by Grace Fan) effectively exploits this difficult but potent script, and presents an earnest reading of Shaffer's Salieri. Arthur Wu dominates the production with his impressive control of both voice and gesture, and makes the psychological portrait of Salieri's anguish convincing. Jessie Cohen plays an irrepressible and eminently likable Mozart, and the casting of a woman in the role of the composer-child emphasizes the youthful and effeminate side of the composer's character as Shaffer interprets...
...will protest that a comparison between a low-budget student production and a high-powered professional recording is invidious, I can only respond that budget and musical talent place no limitation on imaginative and thoughtful interpretation. The difference between the two productions is that Eliot Gardiner, like Peter Shaffer's Salieri, sees a transcendent quality, an absoluteness, in Mozart's music, rather than a mine-field of ambiguities, ripe for exploitation with just the right deconstructive impulse. Granted, ambiguity and equivocation are inevitable as long as we communicate solely in words. But when music is joined to them, absolute, inexpressible...
...rural immediacy of folk and blues and lost its restless, questing spirit. "In rock you're getting middle-class suburban kids who have no experience of anything except what they hear on the radio," she says. "Country music speaks emotional truth. Rock has drifted from it." Says Paul Shaffer, David Letterman's bandleader: "Country is soul music for white people, and people always return to soul music, because that's where the feeling...
...Shaffer's description, country's appeal has something to do with race, it is because pop has rarely been as racially polarized as it is in the era of rap. Country fans, who, like their stars, tend to be white, are not shy about describing their music as the musical equivalent of the urban escapism known as white flight. "Thank God for rap," says Bowen. "Every morning when they play that stuff, people come running to us." Says Ralph Emery: "Rap music speaks only to black issues, and has turned a lot of white people...