Classical Mythology

(Marvins-Underground-K-12) #1

760 THE SURVIVAL OF CLASSICAL MYTHOLOGY



  1. These pioneering American composers began to become unfashionable in the 1920s
    when Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, and later Ned Rorem and many other Amer-
    ican composers went to continue their education in France, not Germany. It became
    very much the musical vogue to go to Paris to study with Nadia Boulanger, a pas-
    sionate follower of Stravinsky. These innovative Francophiles were determined to
    create a new American style, and looked upon the likes of Paine, Chadwick, and Con-
    verse as academic careerists and facile imitators of German romantic composers such
    as Brahms. Another reason for the unfair dismissal of these American pioneers (which
    persists to this day) was the general hostility of an emerging new avant-garde, who
    championed atonality and innovation to the detriment of traditional, tonal, and
    melodic composition.

  2. David Hamilton in his notes for the recording (New World Records 80566-2).

  3. Harry Partch, Bitter Music, Collected Journals, Essays, Introductions, and Librettos. Edited
    with an introduction by Thomas McGeary (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991).
    p. ix (frontispiece).

  4. An important half-hour film documentary on Partch is entitled The Dreamer That Re-
    mains.

  5. Letter to the New York Times (January 12, 1992).

  6. Notes to the recording by Jim Shey (Fresh Aire VI, American Gramophone AGCD-
    386) relate the piece to the Homeric Hymn to Dionysus, where the sailors are turned
    into dolphins, and to a scene from Apuleius, The Golden Ass, about the worship of
    Isis.

  7. In an essay for the recording, Living Music Records LMR-2.

  8. Craig Zadan, Sondheim & Co., 2d ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), pp. 65-68 and
    162-164; included is a priceless photograph of the Yale production of the Frogs.

  9. Isadora Duncan, My Life (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1927), p. 10.

  10. Ibid., pp. 30-31.

  11. Review from The Director, March 1898, quoted by Fredrika Blair, Isadora, Portrait of
    the Artist as a Woman (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1986), p. 27.

  12. Duncan, My Life, pp. 54-55.

  13. Quoted in Blair, Isadora, p. 36.

  14. Quoted in Walter Terry, Isadora Duncan, Her Life, Her Art, Her Legacy (New York:
    Dodd, Mead & Co., 1963), pp. 36 and 100; A flood of imitators were able neither to
    understand nor to follow her concept of the Greek ideal. Terry discusses successors
    (e.g., Shawn, Graham, and Balanchine, among others) who have, like Duncan, found
    a pathway, not an end, in Greek culture, and describes the potent and indelible in-
    spiration Greek antiquity has had upon them all (p. 104): "In her own day, she was
    hailed by the Greeks themselves as the one who had rediscovered the secret of 'the
    age of Greece's greatness.' This discovery, which few of her contemporaries in the
    theatre, in the press and in her public truly understood, has been bequeathed to her
    successors who have used and are using the stimulation provided by the Greek ideal
    in a new renascence of the art of dancing."

  15. Blair, Isadora, in her last chapter on "Isadora's Legacy" (pp. 400-497), offers an ex-
    cellent summary.

  16. The following videos are some of the important reconstructions of Duncan's life and
    choreography: The Enduring Essence: The Technique and Choreography of Isadora Dun-
    can, Remembered and Reconstructed by Gemze De Lappe—Ms. De Lappe describes her

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