Word: working
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...This review is the first of two article concerning new work by Harvard and Radcliffe composers...
Allen Shawn's Song on a text by Maikov seemed a poor work obliterated by unacceptable singing. The piece consisted largely of a tawdry Dello Joio scherzo but provided neither beauty nor interest. It was especially unsuccessful in the registration and duration of its vowels...
...MOST conservative piece of the evening was Leonard Lehrman's String Trio, written with frank lyricism, at times slightly oleoginous, culminating in a strong last page of almost botanical beauty. The work is not wholly successful as its ostinato Intermezzo is banal. The piece is redolent of the elegaic Bartok but would be properly described as derivative rather than eclectic...
...problem with eclecticism is not that it is thievery but that it is miscalculated. It resorts to idiomatic mimicry as an expressive inheritance rather than as the perfect means of musical expression which inner necessity dictates. Eclecticism is consequently faded and diffuse instead of directed towards precise statement. The work of an eclectic laborer cannot possess independent life, whereas the work of the derivative artist cannot possess anything else. This was what T.S. Eliot meant when he said that immature poets borrow while mature poets steal. Stravinsky's Pulcinella is derivative, Poulenc's Gloria eclectic...
Another examples of eclectic music was Michael Friedmann's Leuchten, a "work in progress" for four players. I hope the work progresses considerably because in its present pseudo-Webernian condition it seems unimaginative in the extreme and generally unredeemable. Janice Hamer's String Trio, while stronger, suffers from repetitive alternation between cantilena and pizzicato writing...