Word: soft
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Communism's greatest assets is the readiness of its enemies to credit it with success. Let its policies turn hard, and critics regard its harshness with awe; let Communist policy turn soft, and critics shudder even more at the potentialities of its seductive powers. Let its membership fall, and critics are ready to believe Russian explanations that they really want only hard-core members. Sometimes the fear of becoming complacent leads critics to refuse to face the facts, if those facts appear unfavorable to the Communists. Last week the anti-Communist New Leader magazine issued a special supplement, Communism...
...against the New Learning the stern teachings of the church fathers: "Christ is our only guide to happiness . . . our father, our leader, our light, our food, our redemption, our way, our truth, our life." Fra Dominici exhorted the young monks: "As the years of tender youth flow by, the soft wax may take on any form. Stamp on it the impress not of Narcissus, Myrrha, Phaedra or Ganymede, but of the crucified Christ and of the saints." It was to this effort that Fra Angelico, for whom the goal both of life and art was "the contemplation and realization...
...panel combining the Annunciation and Coming of the Magi (see color pages), which Fra Angelico painted for a reliquary for the convent of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, he relied on rich gold, Byzantine in its richness, for a background. Fra Angelico's own contributions were the new, soft-flowing harmonies of the robes, the fresh coloring which juxtaposed azure against deepest blue, pink against red to create a glowing world of weightless form and radiant, shadowiess color...
...Soft Symphonies. Beethoven and composers who followed him were accustomed to halls in which the reverberation period was comfortably long, i.e., if they clapped their palms, it would take perhaps two seconds for the sound to die to inaudibility. Result: when an orchestra played, it sounded mellow, sometimes foggy. Composers wrote symphonies to be performed under those conditions, and musicians played their instruments no better than necessary to pass muster under the mellow fog. Until the electronic age, except for musicians playing outdoors, everybody was accustomed to the old sound. When Toscanini first walked into NBC's studio...
Hard Mechanics. The movement toward acoustic sharpness and clarity was strengthened by FM radio and hi-fi phonograph reproduction. People who have learned their music via hi-fi complain, when they hear live symphony orchestras for the first time, that the music is too soft and not brilliant enough. Veteran musicians, on the other hand, complain that hi-fi sound is mechanical and unreal. Sound Engineer Bolt, aware that taste in sound changes, believes that many people today do not want merely faithful reproduction but actually a new sound...