Word: twentieths
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Some years ago, Ezra Pound advised young writers to occupy themselves with politics, because the imagery of commitment was the strongest the twentieth century could provide. Reality, to Pound, was no point of debate. "Any tendency to abstract general statement," he wrote, "is a greased slide." Assuredly, Pound's position is not a prediction that the world's artists will preach up a revolution, however much that thought may have been on his mind. He merely skewers the certain fact that a revolution, whether real or only plotted, can discipline art, and that the rhetoric of revolt can strengthen writing...
...number of dramatists and the preponderance of influential dramatic critics seem to have taken all this to heart. Popular thesis books like Brustein's Theatre of Revolt, Bentley's Bernard Shaw, and Blau's The Impossible Theatre argue that a binding social vision has characterized the best of twentieth century drama, and, in the case of Shaw and Brecht, has been responsible for the continuity of the century's finest playwrights. Few critics, other than Marxists, have been very disturbed that neither dramatist was particularly successful in getting programs adopted, legislation passed, or governments changed. It is enough that their...
...concert's most attractive feature was a program devoted to music of the twentieth century--and there wasn't a chestnut within hearing. Some of the works were by composers whose names are quite unfamiliar (Maurice Ohana and Alexandre Hrisanide); others were of more familiar authorship but were themselves infrequently performed works...
...demonstrate the indebtedness of twentieth-century music to Schoenberg's pioneering efforts, as well as to pay the composer a personal tribute, Blackwood followed the Five Pieces with his own Three Short Fantasies, Op. 16 and John Perkins' Caprice (1963), which Blackwood commissioned when the two composers were colleagues at the University of Chicago. Both works begin with Schoenbergian flurries of pianistic cacophony; both depend for internal variety on the alternaton of different timbres, registers, and pianistic effects; and both are long--perhaps too long for the basically epigrammatic nature of the twelve-tone idiom. Without demeaning the compositions themselves...
This outlook had, as an ideal for the future, its attractive, its appealing, sides; but intervening events have demonstrated, if they have demonstrated anything at all, that it is wholly inadequate as an approach to the great problems of twentieth-century international life...