Word: swoboda
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...used to be. A century ago, according to the minutes in the Harvard Archive, the conductor needed to impress "on this Society the necessity of minding the pianos and fortes which have always been treated with more or less contempt in this Society." Not so Friday evening: Dr. Henry Swoboda, in his first Cambridge appearance, and a new, bigger-than-ever HRO, gave their audience the sight and sound of a professional symphony orchestra...
...Swoboda came to the United States in 1939. Although he became a U.S. citizen in the mid-'40's, Swoboda has appeared primarily in Europe, with tours of many continental orchestras. He also toured South and Central America, but did not appear in this country until he conducted at the Empire State Music Festival in 1960. Since then he has led the Symphony of the Air in New York and made recordings with them for Decca...
Concert management has enormous complexities in this country, and this hurdle indeed helped delay Swoboda's appearance here. But he subscribes to no program for changing the system. He remarks that the dangers which the whimsy of society patrons raise are the same as those brought on by government subsidy, where a failure to make selection rigorous could mean "any congressman's niece could get on stage." European state sponsorship has worked well because it has generally fixed strict standards for its grants, but Swoboda feels that American antagonism to active government has enough power to prevent state intervention...
...Swoboda feels himself a member of an older generation, but one who is trying to span the gap with the new one--"I have been a revolutionary all my life--always for the avant-garde." But if he has respect for the "abstract feelings" of modern twelve-tone music and for its distance from the "material world," this sympathy has its limits. Swoboda feels that "every system is in the end based on tonality," and ridicules the break with traditional training in composition of Karlheinz Stockhausen...
...When Swoboda says that "music is not a sideline for me...it is my life," the statement is not just a sentimental wandering. For he goes on to point out that people's absorption with a particular art changes often. He speculates that "the modern man is maybe more functional" and so requires the physical presence of painting and architecture. But for many others music is the most compelling art because it is more a human companion than a functional one. He observes further that today both painting and music have become abstract and act as one's continual surroundings...