Word: melodye
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Strange to U.S. ears are the songs Bela Bartok listens to. The 300 discs of love songs, recorded in wild, mountainous Herzegovina, have irregular, formless lines, queer vocal embellishments. Stranger still are the heroic songs, long, rambling tales of adventure and battle (the longest takes twelve hours to sing; many...
The Seventh Symphony's proportions are heroic, most obviously so in the 27-minute first movement. The deceptively simple opening melody, suggestive of peace, work, hope, is interrupted by the theme of war, "senseless, implacable and brutal." For this martial theme Shostakovich resorts to a musical trick: the violins...
In the first place, the symphony had practically no structure or coherence, nor did it make up for this with strong melody or color. The themes were commonplace and thinly stretched out over 70 minutes of pointless rambling music. Occasionally the familiar Shostakovitch brilliance and poignancy would glimmer for a...
The other work, the Shostakovitch Quintet, is a newcomer still' very much under dispute. Completed in the fall of '40, it won the fabulous Stalin prize and was called by "Pravda" -- "the greatest musical composition of 1940." On the other hand, Haggin of the "Nation" dubbed it fluent nonsense, so...
Aaron Copland's book, "Our New Music," although contributing a few good insights, is on the whole no more valuable than a modern composer's apologia pro arte sua should be, and about as impartial as an epitaph. He brings up the old notion that Beethoven and the Romantics were...