There’s surely only one thing that unites Russian composer Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, the 1974 comedy horror Young Frankenstein and The Muppets’ most recent special on Disney+.
Regrettably, it is not Kermit the Frog. The thing that appears in all of these works has no easily recognizable familiar name, although it is perhaps one of the most recognizable three-beat musical phrases in history. It starts with a dun; it continues with a dun; it ends with a duuun!
On screen, a dramatic “dun, dun duuun” has appeared in everything from Disney’s Fantasia to The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air to The
In the world of books, a modern classic is an altogether more slippery thing than a classic: it must walk a line between freshness and durability; reflect the current age but hope to outlast it. For individual publishers, given many 20th-century writers are still in copyright, a modern classics list will necessarily be partial. However,