So John Corigliano, who is not exactly Elliott Carter, is Mr. Gordon's idea of an intellectual, architectural composer?
Despite its late start as a European nation-state, Romania in the 20th century produced several world-renowned intellectuals, including composer Georges Enesco, playwright Eugène Ionesco, philosopher Emil Cioran, religion historian Mircea Eliade, and Nobel laureate George E. Palade.
In her previous show, devoted mostly to Stephen Sondheim, she found a special compatibility with that ranking intellectual of theater composers.
During the 1960's, when the most hard-edged atonal composers claimed intellectual primacy in American music, tonal composers were condescended to.
Golijov lacks the intellectual caution that leads composers to confine a quasi-tonal melody within knotty, twelve-tone-ish figures.
Postwar avant-garde composers, the intellectual patricians of serialism, gathered in Darmstadt, Germany, after World War II to plot their next tone rows and pick apart old musical languages.
Curiously, Rockwell's support of the German stops short of "the latter-day Germanic school of American composers and intellectual critics, who sought with serialism to resurrect the German hegemony".
If you had to find a composer of huge intellectual capacity at the opposite end of the spectrum, you might come up with Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924).
By the time Berg started to set them, 20 years later, he had become a composer of exceptional intellectual rigour and irresistible romantic sweep.
The term was coined by Hans von Wolzogen, one of a coterie of intellectual sycophants who surrounded the composer in the years before his death, in 1883.
