Word: steinfuls
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...child in Kansas City, Mo., he banged out his first compositions at the piano, with the sustaining pedal down and the dynamic level up. Years later, an American sophisticate in Paris, he collaborated on an opera with Gertrude Stein, Four Saints in Three Acts, fashioning deceptively simple, homey music out of "Pigeons on the grass alas." His 1937 score for Filling Station, with its truck drivers, state troopers and gun-toting gangsters, became the first successful all-American ballet. Although serious composers generally have shunned film scores as hack work, he produced seven of them, and in 1949 collected...
...Chatting with fellow Composer Philip Glass-whose opera Satyagraha has been the most discussed piece of the year-he succinctly bridges the gap between his own down-home aesthetic and Glass's new-wave minimalism: "Glass makes an opera in Sanskrit, and I make an opera in Gertrude Stein...
Thomson has always been a man of broad artistic sympathies. Four Saints astonished its first listeners with its folksy, hymnlike tunes drawn from the composer's Baptist background and sung by an all-black cast. Although the 1928 work has dated badly-a little of Gertrude Stein is, after all, a lot of Gertrude Stein-it is still a landmark, something that served to define what "American" was between the wars...
...last survivors, along with Copland and Sessions, of an important generation of composers that included Walter Piston, Roy Harris, Douglas Moore, Howard Hanson and Leo Sowerby, Thomson's lasting contributions are likely to be the two operas he wrote with Stein (the second was the 1947 The Mother of Us All) and his criticism. Critic Thomson cheerfully concurs about the operas, at least: "I think I am a good opera composer. There have been some 3,000 performances of The Mother of Us All. It makes you know it is foolproof." No major opera house has yet produced...
Like many other dealers, Steinberg started as a pot smoker in his home town (Carpentersville, Ill., pop. 23,000), trying to finance his recreational use. The business seemed so easy that it just grew. Throughout their perilous escapades, Stein berg and friends remained calm, peaceful, fun-loving, devil-may-care. They never used force. If an aide was kidnaped, they paid the ransom. If a distributor burned them on a payoff, they simply did not deal with him again. Their mothers, aunts, wives, girlfriends were recruited to rent safe houses in Miami suburbs for storing drugs or to ride along...