Word: toning
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...early youth, precocious, Munich-born Richard Strauss had written under the influence of Mozart and Brahms. But after about 1885, Strauss's contemporaries called his work "psychopathic music." They railed against the brazen dissonances in his huge, Wagnerian tone poems (Don Quixote, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Death and Transfiguration, etc.), the savage horrors of his operas Salome and Elektra, his general lack of taste in composition. But no one could overlook his genius: his unique gifts as an orchestrator, his penetrating power for illuminating character and for describing anything from the zany antics of Don Quixote to the bestiality...
...traditional twelve-tone scale, Paris' newspaper Le Figaro wondered, "exhausted to the point where a new tone scale should take its place?" Or was it still possible "to discover new expressions and new harmonies" inside the old scale? In short, had musical composition become "a problem of vocabulary or a problem of style?" Last week, after mailing questionnaires to French composers to find out, Le Figaro had some answers...
Only one of the composers who replied thought the traditional scale was all washed up. Wrote 79-year-old but still rebellious Florent Schmitt: "The end of our twelve-tone system is inevitable . . . It has been tortured to the point where it is now as barren as an old skeleton . . . We have to venture into new fields." His solution: an 18-tone scale, made of third-tone intervals instead of the usual half tones...
When Parliament is sitting, the white-haired Prime Minister is in his front-row seat every day, toying with his heavy horn-rimmed glasses or fingering his bristly mustache as he listens to the debates. His own parliamentary speeches are coldly factual, delivered in the tone of a geometry professor lecturing a dull pupil. His manner changes when he feels he is being wrongly accused or is embarrassed by an opponent's attack. Then the quick St. Laurent temper shows itself; his pink face becomes flushed, his brown eyes flash and he sputters out his reply, emphasizing his words with...
Brahms: Concerto in D (Ossy Renardy, violin, with the Concertgebouw Orchestra, Charles Münch conducting; London FFRR-full frequency recording range-formerly the "English Decca" label, 10 sides). Young U.S. Violinist Renardy starts out with thrilling intensity of tone but never seems able to relax, even with the backing of this fine orchestra. Recording: excellent...