Word: modernists
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Difficult though it may be, the quartet that the long-suffering Ojai (Calif.) Festival audience heard last week has proved to be one of the most successful of modernist chamber works. At last week's UNESCO-sponsored International Rostrum of Composers in Paris, it was voted the outstanding musical work of the season. Winner of Pulitzer Prize and of the 1961 New York Music Critics Circle award, it has been recorded (by RCA Victor) and in the single year since its premiere, it has been played at most of the major European festivals. In various program notes around...
...Ojai's festival director, Composer Lukas Foss,the Second String Quartet is not only "not easy" but also "rather astonishing-an opinion shared by most people who have heard it. The astonishment derives in part from the fact that Modernist Composer Carter treats his four instruments as individuals with "individual behavior patterns." The first violin is fantastic, ornate and mercurial," while he second violin is "laconic and orderly " the viola merely "expressive." and the cello "somewhat impetuous...
...opera's hero sings flat on his belly). With the composer and his wife themselves adapting the tale, the entire effort seems to have been embarrassing and painful to Prokofiev. As he had promised, he did weave a number of tuneful folk motifs into his usual sophisticated, modernist composition, even included a vintage Red army marching song. But the composer seemed somehow unable to conceal his treasonable pessimism and basic disbelief in the opera. When his hospitalized hero grabs a nurse and gaily dances on artificial legs to prove to doctors his fitness for combat, the music is merely...
Until the musicales started, the restaurant was losing some $4,000 a month. Now the place is prospering. La Pine-O'Neill have found that they can pack their restaurant not only by playing the music of the masters but also with modernist works of such composers as Irving Fine and Gunther Schuller. Next: Menotti's 30-minute opera The Telephone. The musicians find the whole thing relaxing, and countless bourbon drinkers have told O'Neill that they have never heard Beethoven in quite so clear a tone...
Soon Cage and Tudor were darting about between three record players, shifting from Mozart to blues to a recorded speech by Pope John XXIII calling for world peace. By the finale, fights had broken out all over the theater. "Get out of here!" screamed the traditionalists. Replied an unCaged modernist: "Go somewhere else if you want melody! Long live music!" Cage barked at the audience; the audience barked back at Cage. One notable dissenter: Igor Stravinsky, who found the whole business so tedious that he slipped out in mid-concert. Asked if the tumult was equal to what went...