Word: absented
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...Cologne, Germany, an autocratic, absent-minded composer named Karlheinz Stockhausen has fun supplying the state-run West German Radio with electronic music. Many of the sounds he makes resemble those of the Barrons, but his attitude is at the opposite esthetic pole. A conservatory pupil first, then an electronic expert, he composes on paper (his scores suggest a cross between economists' graphs and architects' schemes), then reduces his ideas to sound. This involves great concentration and endless experiment...
Such complete absorption gives Saarinen the bemused air of the absent-minded professor. Flying out last April to see the site of the new Air Force Academy near Colorado Springs (on which he is an architectural consultant), he suddenly turned to his companions, asked: "Just who is Grace Kelly?" Next day he told his wife earnestly: "I really didn't know Kay Francis was marrying that Prince...
...Also absent from the edited dialogue was the voice of an unnamed delegate shouting from the hall, "Why didn't you kill him?" and Khrushchev's reply: "What could we do? There was a reign of terror." No mention was made, either, of the fact that, at Stalin's order, the elephantine Khrushchev had once performed the gopak, a fast Ukrainian dance. Nor did the transcript record such homely touches as the cob-nosed Nikita in tears as he told of children being tortured, and the fact that 30 delegates had fainted and had to be lugged...
There was nothing spectacular about 1931's final two years as undergraduates. The headline events of the years just previous, like the sudden severance of athletic relations with Princeton in 1926 or the great riot in the Square in 1927, were markedly absent. But actually, as the Class finished its career, the College itself was completing a revolutionary physical change that left it much as it is today...
...finalists finished up at the rate of two a night. Each night, haggard but happy, the contestants went through a ritual, solemnly crossing the silverware at the places of the two absent finalists who were performing that night, sticking a knife into an erect piece of bread at each place and turning the chairs upside down. At week's end, at last they filed onto the stage, where they heard the verdict of the 13-member panel of judges (including Pianists Artur Rubinstein, Robert Casadesus, Emil Gilels). The winners: first Ashkenazy, second Browning, third Czajkowski...