Word: tuneless
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Composer Shostakovich has been on & off the careening bandwagon of the Soviet music party line. When he was off, his work was denounced as "un-Soviet, unwholesome, cheap, eccentric, tuneless and Leftist" by Pravda, which probably spoke for Musicritic Stalin. Shostakovich's fifth symphony, a thoughtful and tuneful glorification of the October Revolution, got him back on the bandwagon. Since then (1937) he has worked in the Leningrad Conservatory. The symphony which Philadelphia heard last week sounded as if Shostakovich's seat were secure-even though the symphony lacked a choral apotheosis of Lenin which the composer...
...begun to put slightly more melodious whistles in his work. Not so, his disciple Krenek. Last spring Composer Krenek, in an article in Musical America, deplored the reaction of his contemporaries, exhorted them to turn back to the stern old days of esthetic revolution, of completely tuneless music...
...their dispersal from Palestine) Jews have followed many gods. Modern Jews have espoused two diametrically opposed causes: 1) Radicalism (which promises Jews a society without racial prejudice) and 2) Zionism (which promises Jews a national home in Palestine). While leftist-minded Jewish composers tend to express themselves in the tuneless technicalities of modernism, or in the Negroid dialect of jazz, Zionist-minded Jewish composers seek a purely Jewish variety of concert music, color their symphonies and sonatas with the traditional chants of the ancient Hebrews...
...Shostakovich been Bol- shevism's musical darling, but Capitalism in Manhattan put on its boiled shirts and sped to the splendiferous Metropolitan Opera House premiere of his master work, Lady Macbeth of Mzensk (TIME, Feb.11, 1935). Pravda called Shostakovich's compositions "un-Soviet, unwholesome, cheap, eccentric and tuneless." The devastating Communist epithet "bourgeois" was tagged to them. Rehearsals of his latest ballet Limpid Stream, on which the Corps de Ballet of Moscow's great Bolshoi Theatre have been working diligently for months, were canceled. As Soviet critics leaped to a new point of view which would save...
Such talk was sweet music to the mayors which made other subjects sound dull and tuneless. Attorney General Cummings talked about crime control and the mayors made a tour through J. Edgar Hoover's Bureau of Investigation. Experts spoke to them on traffic safety, noise abatement, fire prevention. Senator Wagner urged them to support low-cost Government housing. One evening was given over to the problem of "busting the Gas Trust." But the conference really got back to business and excitement when it got back to the subject of relief and Government money...