Word: tempo
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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This was the period of Kern's "Princess Theater musicals," written with Wodehouse (pre-Jeeves) and Bolton. At a time when Continental operettas were all the rage, these "midget musical comedies" -- airy, brash and daringly American -- created a theatrical revolution to a ragtime beat. They set the tone and tempo on Broadway for the next decade and beyond. When the style changed, it was again Kern who reshaped it, along with Oscar Hammerstein II. Their 1927 Show Boat, with its sweeping seriousness and its near operatic transformation of blues and folk music, paved the Great White Way for Porgy...
...Last Time I Saw Paris. He mercilessly cut any song that did not fit its situation. Conversely, he was a great hoarder and tinkerer. Alter just a few bars of Till the Clouds Roll By and presto! it becomes Look for the Silver Lining. Invert the melody, depress the tempo and voila! the Cotton Blossom theme from Show Boat is alchemized into Ol' Man River...
...even if Bach realized that his music would last, he surely could not have imagined the changes posterity would make. Director of the Electronic Music Studio Ivan A. Tcherepnin said, "Bach showed a lot of foresight by not specifying instruments, tempo, or dynamics in some of his works. It's as if he was saying, in three hundred years, you can experiment with these things...
...congressional and baseball seasons usually run in rough parallel: light workouts in late winter; an irregularly quickening tempo culminating in serious legislative battles about the time of the major league playoffs and World Series. But this year the politicians are well ahead of the ballplayers. While pitchers and catchers were just starting to limber up last week under the Florida sun, Congress and the Reagan Administration had already worked themselves into a snarl of midseason intensity. A filibuster was tying up the Senate, an attempted compromise between the Administration and its Democratic opponents fell apart within hours, and partisan tempers...
...come-from-behind team," he added. "We have to control the tempo in order to be successful...