Lexicon of Musical Invective: Critical Assaults on Composers Since Beethoven's Time
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.80 (808 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 039332009X |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 336 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2014-12-11 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Nicolas Slonimsky, pianist, composer, conductor, author, lexicographer, jingle writer, and parent who spoke Latin to his daughter, died in 1996 at the age of 100.
Itself a classic, this collection of nasty barbs about composers and their works, culled mostly from contemporaneous newspapers and magazines, makes for hilarious reading and belongs on the shelf of everyone who lovesor hates classical music. Among the eminent reviewers are George Bernard Shaw, Virgil Thomson, Hans von Bülow, Friedrich Nietzsche, Eduard Hanslick, Olin Downes, Deems Taylor, Paul Rosenfeld, and Oscar Wilde. "A supermarket tabloid of classical music criticism."From the new foreword by Peter Schickele. A snakeful of critical venom aimed at the composers and the classics of nineteenth- and twentieth-century music. Who wrote advanced cat music? What commonplace theme is very much like Yankee Doodle? Which composer is a scoundrel and a giftless bastard? What opera would His Satanic Majesty turn out? Whose name suggests fierce whiskers stained with vodka? And finally, what third movement begins with a dog howling
. About the Author Nicolas Slonimsky, pianist, composer, conductor, author, lexicographer, jingle writer, and parent who spoke Latin to his daughter, died in 1996 at the age of 100
"Lexicon of Musical Invective" according to Nyal Williams. Of interest to the most serious listeners of classical music. The author, Nicolas Slonimsky, was a composer, conductor, and author/editor of Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians and was the most thorough chaser after obscure biographical information ever known. This lexicon compiles spiteful reviews of music from the 1800s to the middle of the twentieth century. It is essentially a look at the music critic's mis-judgment of the new and innovative music of their time.. Good to flip through for a chuckle at how wrong some critics ultimately proved to be Nicolas Slonimsky's LEXICON OF MUSICAL INVECTIVE collects those critical reviews of composers from Beethoven's time which proved "biased, unfair, ill-tempered, and singularly unprophetic judgements". It's handily arranged in alphabetic order by composer, so while listening to, say, Bela Bartok's first piano concerto, you can amuse yourself with a 1928 review from the Cincinnati Enquirer:"Mr. Bartok elected to play his composition dignified by the title Concerto for Pianoforte and Orchestra. Note the ommission of key. Ultra-moderns cannot be bothered with such triflin. Fear of the unknown Bob Zeidler is a "fresher" expression for Nicholas Slonimsky's introduction, "Non-Acceptance of the Unfamiliar," to this howler of a compendium of musical criticism.In a nutshell, this book is a collection of excerpts from reviews, commentary and correspondence regarding the music of forty-three composers over a 150-year span, beginning with Beethoven and ending (approximately) with Bartók, Schoenberg, Shostakovich and Stravinsky. While most of the composers are well-known, some (Henry Cowell, Roy Harris, Wallingford Riegger, Carl Ruggles, Edgar Varèse) are hardly