When Rudy Vallee exclaimed, "Heigh-Ho, Everybody!" through his trademark megaphone, his audience of young (mostly female) fans erupted in screams. The appearance of Vallee and his Connecticut Yan- kees at Keith's 81st Street Theater in February 1929 had attracted hundreds of delirious teen-agers, as well as a contingent of New York's Finest (on horseback) to contend with them. No popular singing star had ever created such tumult. It was, wrote one show business reporter, "an explosion...
Trumpeter Harry James was uneasy as he warmed up backstage at New York's Carnegie Hall on the evening of January 16, 1938. "I feel like a whore in a church," he told a colleague. He had every reason to be nervous. Benny Goodman's swing band, with James on trumpet, was about to play a full-length concert-the first such performance ever given in America's most prestigious concert hall by a jazz group.
If anyone was prepared to bring jazz to Carnegie Hall, it was Benny Goodman. Known from...
After two years as a teacher in the United States during the 1890s, noted Czech composer Antonin Dvorak issued a surprising challenge to his hosts.
"Just as this nation has already surpassed so many others in marvel- ous inventions and feats of engineering and commerce," he said, "and has made an honorable place for itself in literature. ..,so it must assert itself in the other arts, and especially in the art of music."
In Dvorak's time, as today, American classical music...
then centuries old.)
The single most important develop- ment in the history of European music, according to Joseph Machlis in The En- joyment of Music (Norton, 5th ed., 1984), was the emergence between 850 and 1150 A.D. of polyphony-the use of two or more melodic lines. Polyphony re- quired ever more precise forms of nota- tion. Music, says Machlis, "took a long step from being an art of improvisation and oral tradition to one that was care- fully planned and that could be preserved accurately."...
"Manners and Morals2'-the expression is peculiarly, unrnistak- ably Victorian. Not "manners" alone: Lord Chesterfield in the 18th century was fond of discoursing to his son on the supreme irnpor- tance of manners-manners as distinct from (if necessary, in opposi- tion to) morals. And not "morals" alone: Philosophers had always taken this as their special province, had, indeed, made it so elevated a subject that it had little to do with anything so mundane as manners.
It...
Airlift. "Just as a trickle of water can, if sufficiently prolonged, wear down the stoutest rock, "wrote The New Yorker 's E. J. Kahn in May 1949, "so the airlift, with its unostentatious but ceaseless trickle of flights, carved a hole in the Soviet blockade of [ West] Berlin. "A week later, Stalin ended his effort to starve the city into submission.
WQ SUMMER 1988
100
During the summer of 1948, the future of West Berlin seemed to hang in the balance. On June 24, Josef Stalin...
Airlift. "Just as a trickle of water can, if sufficiently prolonged, wear down the stoutest rock, "wrote The New Yorker 's E. J. Kahn in May 1949, "so the airlift, with its unostentatious but ceaseless trickle of flights, carved a hole in the Soviet blockade of [ West] Berlin. "A week later, Stalin ended his effort to starve the city into submission.
WQ SUMMER 1988
100
During the summer of 1948, the future of West Berlin seemed to hang in the balance. On June 24, Josef Stalin...
.
On Breitscheidplatz, the main square in the heart of the city, two dozen German women dressed in sports suits, all in late middle age, are stepping out, moving gingerly to the beat of a Bavarian march. With their ample midriffs pressing against their leotards, these members of an exercise club from Munich lift and twirl their batons toward the sky. Some 300 shoppers and passersby-senior citizens, middle-aged cou- ples, many with their children-applaud approvingly as the group com- pletes its...
jetliner, the window- counterparts at the Berlin Air Safety Center seat passenger can see the Berlin Wall three (BASC). The BASC monitors the plane traffic in times. Heading east, he first glimpses the bar- the 20-mile-wide air corridors that link West rier where it runs between East Germany and Berlin and West Germany. West Berlin. From an altitude of several thou- "Since we're in the same room around the sand feet, the broad "death strip" looks as be- clock, our shift work becomes...
politics in the 20th century than Berlin. Yet unlike other major West European capitals-Rome, Paris, London-old Berh bloomed late as a cosmopolitan center. "Prior to 1871," as Gerhard Masur points out in Imperial Berlin (Basic, 1971), "the great powers of the world would not have considered the city worth the price of a bitter international struggle."
The city, writes Gordon A. Craig in The Germans (Penguin, 1983), was founded late in the 12th century as a tiny traclmg settlement...