3/19/2023 0 Comments Four stringed instrument crossword![]() This is music of recessed, elusive beauty, although it has its moments of wildness and weirdness. An Amherst student named Weir Chrisemer, the Society’s founder, came across a recording of it and found it to have “no redeeming merit.” The same piece so thrilled Joyce that he knocked unannounced on Schoeck’s door, in Zurich, and said, in German, “Does the man live here who composed ‘Lebendig Begraben’?” Most listeners, on first encountering Schoeck, will probably fall somewhere between the extremes of Chrisemer and Joyce. ![]() The work that prompted the formation of the Society was Schoeck’s orchestral song cycle “Lebendig Begraben,” or “Buried Alive,” composed in 1926. At the time of their fateful encounter, Penn was riding a unicycle and Teller was selling pencils emblazoned with Schoeck’s name. The group is best remembered for having precipitated the meeting of the illusionists Penn and Teller. A further quiver of notoriety followed in the nineteen-seventies, when, as Calvin Trillin related in this magazine, students at Amherst College launched an absurdist organization called the Othmar Schoeck Memorial Society for the Preservation of Unusual and Disgusting Music. Hermann Hesse ranked Schoeck’s songs alongside those of Schubert and Schumann James Joyce considered him a rival to Stravinsky Thomas Mann also thought highly of him. For one thing, Schoeck gained the admiration of several leading writers of the twentieth century. ![]() The Swiss composer Othmar Schoeck, who lived from 1886 to 1957, is little known outside his native land, but his moments of fame have been as striking as they are strange.
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