Word: symphonist
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...professor talks an ornate game. But he could use a good personnel consultant. For his ill-chosen crew consists of Gawain MacSam (Marlon Wayans), a symphonist of obscenities; a silent, deadly, chain-smoking Vietnamese convenience-store operator (Tzi Ma); a football-playing moron (Ryan Hurst); and, best of all, Garth Pancake (J.K. Simmons), a militant liberal, serenely overconfident of his skill with powder and fuses and, alas, afflicted by irritable-bowel syndrome, which kicks in at inopportune moments. Oh, almost forgot to mention this--most of them have hair-trigger tempers, which do not aid them in the swift completion...
...challenging new scores. Liebermann, Daniel Asia, Jorge Martin, Paul Moravec and George Tsontakis were among the first younger composers to snub its stuttering chatter in favor of a full-blooded style that is at once unmistakably contemporary (Liebermann, for instance, was influenced by the great 20th century Russian symphonist Dmitri Shostakovich) and rooted in the techniques of the past...
Robert Schumann's irrefutable greatness rests on the expressive richness of his piano music and the beauty of his lyric songs. However, his stature as a symphonist has remained unsettled since his death in 1856. For some he is the link between Schubert's lyricism and Brahms' grandeur. But The New Grove Dictionary dismisses his symphonies as "inflated piano music with mainly routine orchestration." Because of their melodic fecundity and power, they remain widely performed and recorded. Still, conductors from Gustav Mahler to George Szell have edited their working scores, attempting to compensate for Schumann's putative deficiencies: amateurish orchestration...
...composer who has been popular in his lifetime often goes into eclipse after his death and never regains popularity. The history of music is full of examples: Joachim Raff, considered a great symphonist 100 years ago; Giacomo Meyerbeer, king of grand opera in the mid-19th century. The once esteemed Jean Sibelius, whose music fell into disfavor more than a decade before his death in 1957, is only now beginning to be reassessed...
...later expressionist composers. But Bruckner can be dismissed as easily, and with as much in telligence, as can Beethoven or Chartres Cathedral. This image of an uninspired symphonic rhetorician of beleaguered loquacity, "tortive and errant" as Shakespeare's Agamemnon, must yield to a clearer portrait of a consummately endowed symphonist firmly in the classical tradition...