Word: vocalism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Giant Butterfly. A cultural hero's welcome awaits him. At the premiere of Dreams, the audience demanded 31 curtain calls. Critics raved about Yun's prodigious orchestral and vocal writing and his intuitive knack for fantasy. The first work, Dreams of Liu-tung, depicts the adventures of a frivolous student who is converted to Taoism when a magician conjures up four dreams that chillingly depict his fate. Butterfly Widow is a comedy about a high-court functionary, Chan-tse, who dreams each night that he is a beautiful giant butterfly. A philosopher tells Chan-tse that...
...plots, Yun's serial music, with its Oriental overtones, is so inscrutable that the orchestra and offstage chorus required no fewer than 30 rehearsals. Yun's use of twelve-tone rows is as free as his theatrical fantasy. The singers often had to master unaccompanied vocal lines, and the orchestra itself was augmented by whips, rattles and bells. At the end, as color projections were flashed onto a transparent curtain, boulder-size clusters of tone shot from the orchestra, and twelve percussion instruments went wild with pings, thumps, roars and growling glissandi. Then the tumultuous sound dissolved...
...four first-class soloists (Maria Stader, soprano; Hertha Töpper, alto; John van Kesteren, tenor; Karl-Christian Kohn, bass) enter into the spirit of their conductor's classical conception: they never struggle to achieve Wagnerian eminence of tone but modestly blend into the musical architecture. The vocal texture of the Munich Bach Choir is glowingly transparent, despite its 90-odd members, even in the tumultuous contrapuntal sections...
...presidential election might have served to bring the issue into focus earlier, but it failed to do so. It was the Johnson Administration that had started Sentinel, and Vice President Hubert Humphrey chose not to campaign against it then (he is now a vocal opponent). For his part, Nixon was warning against a possible "security gap" vis-à-vis the Soviet Union and thus encouraging the ABM's backers. A new Administration and a new Congress offered...
...expensive, though-"about $2,000 a pound," said Cass, explaining that her regimen (four days of complete fasting per week) finally put her in the hospital and forced her to cancel $250,000 worth of bookings. "The Mama Cass diet can give you acute tonsillitis, hemorrhaging vocal cords, mononucleosis and a case of hepatitis," she said. And now? "Lose 55 more pounds-then ask Oscar de La Renta to design an entire wardrobe...