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Out of Print Cont.

January 6, 2004 By

Another fantastic music book already out of print, though only published in 1990: The Apollonian Clockwork by Louis Andriessen and Elmer Schonberger, a wildly imaginative series of essays exploring odd but startlingly revealing corners of the life and music of Igor Stravinsky. It opens with a copy of the mug shot taken of Stravinsky when he was arrested in Boston in 1942 for having made his own orchestral arrangement of the “Star-Spangled Banner” (‘tampering with national property” was the charge, no kidding), and discusses such subjects as why Stravinsky’s counterpoint trips into parallel unisons that don’t sound like unisons, and why he was the only major 20th-century composer no one could get away with imitating. It is the most creative literary homage I ever seen made to a composer, not to mention a gold mine of clever quotations by and about Stravinsky. OUT OF PRINT.

01/6/04 9:48 PM | filed under: main |

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