Word: staid
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Black-bearded Composer Alan Bush, professor at London's Royal Academy of Music, an industrious writer of acid, modernistic scores, has long believed that the only important function of music is to encourage revolution. In 1929, while staid London music lovers frowned and looked the other way, London's musical leftists, led by Composer Bush, drew throngs to a class-angled production of Handel's venerable sacred oratorio, Belshazzar. Handel's serene 18th-Century score was sung with traditional massiveness by a chorus of 1,800 voices. But it was so staged that the fall...
Year and a half ago Manhattan's New York University hired Bandmaster Vincent Lopez to give a course in the appreciation of jazz music. Last week staid Harvard University burst shagging from its cell, organized an unofficial swing course in the Music Deaprtment and set aside $250 of Harvard's Rogers Fund to buy swing records...
...record sounds very like a geophysicist and very unlike a child story teller: Harvard Ph.D. in 1914 with a record of "A's", Phi Beta Kappa, teacher successively at ten colleges such as Radcliffe, Oberlin, Stanford and Victoria in New Zealand, he feels that children's books are too staid, that his are going to be different...
Meanwhile, Composer Strauss continued to startle and scandalize staid concert audiences in more subtle ways. He flouted time-honored symphonic proprieties by writing naturalistic musical descriptions of mundane scenes and events. In his symphonic poem, Don Quixote, he made the brass instruments of the orchestra bleat like sheep. In his later Symphonia Domestica, an enormous orchestra of 108 players was set to work imitating the sound of a baby in a bathtub. He boasted that he could depict anything in music recognizably, even a glass of water. Critics deplored his vulgarity, but they had to admit that Composer Strauss...
Even today few piano accordion squeezers rank as virtuosos. But this week, after an accordion recital in Philadelphia's staid Academy of Music, Philadelphia critics admitted that their townsman, dark, 30-year-old Andy Arcari, could claim the title. Accordionist Arcari, who had given previous recitals in Pittsburgh and Toledo, played a program ranging from Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue to Sarasate's Zigeunerweisen. Said Critic Henry Pleasants: "Here was a brilliance in scale and arpeggio passages that many a violinist or pianist could envy." Virtuoso Arcari, who makes most of his living teaching and playing...