Word: rite
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...rolling prairies of the Platte River country. They met as legal eaglets at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Mo. Both, on graduation, went to St. Louis to practice. Both became members of the same Grace Methodist Episcopal Church in a "nice" residential district; both joined the same Scottish Rite Masonic lodge; both became trustees of the church and members of the Salvation Army's board. Mrs. Donnell and Mrs. McDaniel for 23 years have been members of the same Mother-craft club, and their children belong to the same church clubs and Sunday School...
...meaningless. To me they were an exciting visualitation of exactly what happens in the mind when a Bach fugue is played. I agree with those who disliked Disney's Pastoral Symphony because it was artificial and not a little silly, and with those who thought most of The Rite of Spring pretty flimsy stuff. But this may be only because we are too rigidly addicted to a standard program for some works...
Stravinsky's Rite, which has caused high-brow audiences to rise, shout and pound on their neighbors' skulls in ecstasy, offered a serious problem. To match its cosmic hullabaloo, nothing less than a planetary cataclysm would do. So Disney men began studying nebulae and comets at California's Mount Wilson Observatory, mugged up on theories of protozoic life, earthquakes and other geologic upheavals, did portraits of every prehistoric monster in Manhattan's American Museum of Natural History...
...Museum of Natural History and Chester Stock of California Institute of Technology were called in for advice. A herd of pet iguanas and a baby alligator wriggled over the Burbank lot, while animators studied their lizardy movements. By the time a complete cast had been rounded up for the Rite, the Disney zoo contained eusthenopterons, brachiosaurs, brontosaurs, plesiosaurs, mesosaurs, diplodocuses, triceratopses, pterodactyls, trachodons, struthiomimuses, stegosaurs, archaeopteryxes, pteranodons, tyrannosaurs and enough plain run-of-the-Jurassic dinosaurs to people a planet. Studio cameras groaned under the burden of the whole story of evolution...
...they would spend their lives working for Disney if he would give them the chance. Composer Igor Stravinsky himself has signed a contract to do more music with Disney, has blandly averred that Disney's paleontological cataclysm was what he had had in mind all along in his Rite of Spring. Musicians and sound engineers who came to hear Soundman Garity's gadgets perform found that such recording had never before been even approached. Music lovers crowed that more ears would be saved for Beethoven by Fantasia than by all the symphonic lecture-recitalists...