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Text 1
How Do You Know It's Good?
About the author:
Marya Mannes(1904-1990): US journalist, writer. She was a
free-lance writer and columnist; whose famous work is Uncoupling:
The Art of Coming Apart, 1973.
Language notes:
1.
Nobody recently has expressed this philosophy more succinctly
than Dr. Frank Stanton, the highly intelligent president of
CBS television.
CBS stands for Columbia Broadcasting Corporation.
2.
Who wants to be caught flagrante delicto with an error
of judgment as serious as this ?
Flagrante delito: [Latin] on the spot
while the crime is, or was, being committed.
e.g. catch a thief flagrante
delito
3...If
anything goes, everything goes;
The word "go" means "apply or be successful" in the sentence.
4.
Can a standard of craftsmanship apply to art of all ages,
or does each have its own, and different, definitions?
Apply to: be directly related.
5.egotherapy:自我疗法.
6.Next
to art, I would say that appreciation and evaluation in the
field of music is the most difficult.
Next to: besides
7.When
you come to theater, in this extremely hasty tour of the arts,
you can approach it on two different levels.
When you come to means when you talk about or when
you consider theater.
Cliché: an expression or idea used so often that it has
lost much of its expressive force.
8.
avant-garde: pertaining to the experimental treatment
of artistic musical or literary material.
Text 2
How We Listen to Music
About the author:
It is ironic that Aaron Copland has become an iconic figure
in American cultural history. Copland was born of Russian-Jewish
parents, was a homosexual, and during the 1930s was a traveler
of the American Communist party. Copland had been interested
in left-wing politics since 1919, and his decision to simplify
his music in the 1930s was, in part at least, politically
motivated. Copland's subsequent "American style" pieces, aimed
at a popular audience, were some of the cultural fruits of
the Popular Front, an "anti-fascist" alliance through which
the Soviet Union sought to co-opt liberals in America and
elsewhere. Copland remained a genuinely popular composer even
at the height of the McCarthy years, however. Historians will
record that his music served as the model for the modern American
style of classical composition.
Language notes:
1.We
all listen to music according to our separate capacities.
Capacities refers to ability or power.
2.The
simplest way of listening to music is to listen for the sheer
pleasure of the musical sound itself.
Sheer: pure
3.Imagine
one note struck on the piano.
Note: musical note.
4.They
go to concerts in order to lose themselves.
To lose oneself： to indulge in something.
5.Music
allows them to leave it, and they go off to a place to dream,
dreaming because of and apropos of the music yet never quite
listening to it.
The preposition "apropos" is used to introduce a new subject
connected with what has just been mentioned.
6.Its
appeal to every normal human being is self-evident.
Appeal refers to attractiveness.
7.Composers
have a way of shying away from any discussion of music's expressive
side.
Shy away from means to avoid because of fear,
dislike or lack of confidence.
8.My
own belief is that all music has an expressive power, some
more and some less, but that all music has a certain meaning
behind the notes and that that meaning behind the notes constitutes,
after all, what the piece is saying, what the piece is about.
In "and that that meaning behind the notes constitutes…",the
first that is a conjunction used to introduce a clause while
the second one is a pronoun .
9.And
any musician will tell you that that is why Beethoven is the
greater composer ─ because music which always says the same
thing to you will necessarily soon become dull music, but
music whose meaning is slightly different with each hearing
has a greater chance of remaining alive.
Pay attention to the use of "that" as mentioned in the above
note.
10.You
will soon realize that each theme mirrors a different world
of feeling.
In this sentence, the word "mirror" is used as a verb which
means "to reflect."
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