In Manhattan's Aeolian Hall one afternoon in 1925, Conductor" Walter Damrosch put down his baton, turned to the audience that had just listened to the first performance of a new work by an unknown young composer. Roared Damrosch, in facetious disavowal of music that he had nonetheless thought well worth performing: "If a young man of 23 can write a symphony like that, in five years he will be ready to commit murder."
Many a listener, nerves frayed by the dissonances and the jerky jazzy rhythms he had just heard, sourly agreed. But time...
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