Word: monkish
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Paul's Chapel to hear the Princeton Chapel Choir sing it. Composer Harris had cluttered up the program with his usual pious phrases about American music ("All the materials have been extracted from prototypes of American folk songs"). Some of the new Mass sounded more like monkish Plainsong. But there was plenty of power, freshness and vigor, and surprisingly little of Harris' usual repetitiousness...
...fortnight ago, a monkish, grey-bearded 64 but still hungry for new music, Ernest Ansermet was back in the U.S. He had come at the invitation of his friend Arturo Toscanini to conduct the NBC Symphony Orchestra in four concerts, and he had brought along a briefcase full of surprises. For his first concert, he wrenched the orchestra and three soloists through a jangling, abrasive concerto for harp, harpsichord, piano and strings by Swiss Composer Frank Martin. Last week, he pulled out another new work: the Symphony No. 5 of Czech Composer Bohuslav Martinu. Another surprise: a seldom-heard work...
...Pietro Secchia is in charge of organization and recruiting of new members. A broad-shouldered giant with a monkish, curiously luminous face under a mop of dark hair, his brilliant false teeth glittering as he speaks, he lacks his colleagues' intellectual sparkle; but he tops them in dogged organizing genius. Secchia has himself stated his objective: "A Communist section for every church tower in Italy...
Parisians were bewildered because the monkish composer, a devout, 38-year-old Catholic, punctuates his pious music with bird calls and Hindu rhythms. Instead of repose, listeners felt spastic jerkiness; instead of exalting sonorities, they heard grinding dissonance. After a performance of his Three Short Liturgies of the Divine Presence, which is scored (among other things) for a xylophone and two dried gourds with rattling seeds, one Paris critic snorted: "African witchcraft rather than Christian music...
...people beset with chaotic politics, strikes and shortages (see FOREIGN NEWS). Last week many a Parisian found a refuge from these storms in the sparkling new Galerie des Carets. There hung the paintings of a man whom some conservative critics have come to prefer to Picasso. He was monkish old Georges Rouault, whose fat, smoldering judges, jeweled kings, whores, clowns and solitary Christs grow richer and stranger year by year. They looked not like paint but hot coals, caked angrily into patterns by a muscle-bound man with a trowel...