Word: drumstick
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...series of guitar, xylophone and muted cowbell flights as vaporous and softly glowing as a Japanese watercolor. Cohn's Quotations, on the other hand, utilized 103 instruments (including the exposed strings of a grand piano, which one player walloped with a lamb's-wool-covered drumstick) to achieve frequent climaxes of crashing, ear-numbing virtuosity. But the composition's most effective moments were also the most subdued: a passage in which drums rolled with the distant tremble of thunder while the pod rattle and wood blocks chattered with the strident noises of night...
...test the "untapped melodic resources" of the drums. The technical problems, he discovered, were sizable. Examples: how to pass rapidly from one drum, fortissimo, to another, without the resonance of the first canceling out the pitch of the second (part of the solution was to use a medium-padded drumstick); how to allow the tympanist enough time between solo passages for retuning (the hot concert-hall lights tend to raise drum pitch, while the audience's body moisture in the air lowers...
...year his uncle made Bill eat and pick things up with his left hand; once when he fell asleep clutching a half-eaten turkey drumstick in his right fist, Uncle Bob switched the bone to Billy's left hand so that he would wake up with everything right...
They're in mourning over at the Bandroom, for their Drum is dead. The eight-foot instrument, once the largest playable bass drum in the world, expired last week after a twenty-eight year battle with damp weather which expanded its cowhide sides, and a mammoth drumstick, which contracted them. But the Bandsmen are not spending their time in idle, tearsome reflections--of how the Drum stopper a Yale student who tried to jump through it, of how a Cambridge boy once rode on top, whamming it with the huge drumstick...
...anything, ma'am," said Carter, and he did. He swept rooms, washed dishes and waited on table. When the trains came through, he sold fried chicken to the passengers. ("We fried the chickens in a thick batter, and you couldn't tell the drumstick from the gizzard.") He cleaned harness, curried the town doctor's horse and frequently slept on the livery-stable stairs. ("That was the only time I ever envied anyone. I envied people that slept in beds...