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He raised the pitch. Serge Koussevitzky in a drawing by Olga Koussevitzky from `Gentlemen, More Dolce Please!': An Irreverent Memoir of Thirty Years in the Boston Symphony Orchestra, by Harry Ellis Dickson. Here Mr. Dickson describes the Russian-born conductor in action: To him music could not exist without great beauty of sound and he is the only conductor I have ever known who spent hours of rehearsal time practicing sound. We would play certain passages over and over again ``until,'' as he would say, ``we will have `our' sonority.'' One of his constant pleadings was for ``more dolce.'' Indeed ``dolce'' became for him a word signifying perfection in music. If there was bad ensemble, he would shout, ``Gentlemen, it is awfully not togedder! You must play more dolce.'' If he thought it was too loud, he would admonish the players to play more softly and ``more dolce.'' If it was too soft, he would say, ``I cannot hear the dolce.'' Not sustained enough? ``Gentlemen, please don't made it a low in the music'' (``low'' was a direct aural translation from German ``loch''), ``because when you made it a low the dolce was lost!''

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