Word: gourd
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Approximately 20 minutes before curtain time, men and women in blue jeans and work shirts began walking slowly, slowly onto the curtainless stage of Paris' Theatre National Populaire. There they stood or sat, meditatively waiting. At 8:30, Indian Musician Nageswara Rao appeared, carrying his vina - a long, gourd-based stringed instrument, much like the sitar popularized by Ravi Shankar and Beatle George Harrison. For a quarter of an hour, the vina mewed and whinnied while no one moved. Then things began to come to life...
...SHANKAR IN NEW YORK (World Pacific). The master sitarist's latest rendition of the sound that has infiltrated jazz and indeed reOriented all Western popular music. Ever since the Beatles endorsed Shankars traditional Indian music last year, his ragas have become all the rage. From the long-necked, gourd-bellied sitar, Shankar strokes a whining, hypnotizing stream of spontaneous melodies within the framework of a predetermined pattern of notes. The Eastern "scales" he uses are now definitely required running by jazz musicians, especially bassists, whose solos frequently echo his soulful, inscrutable improvisations...
Fresh off the boat from Italy, gourd-shaped Giulio Gatti-Casazza heads straight for Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera. As the newly appointed general manager of the Met, he is eager to have a look at his new home. Mama mia! What he sees is enough to curl his beard. It's bad enough that the exterior looks like a brewery. But the backstage area is so cramped that it can hardly accommodate a P.T.A. pageant. Principal singers, he finds to his horror, have to rehearse in the ladies' powder room; scenery is stacked behind the building...
...Whole Story. What makes Cleveland Curator William Wixom overjoyed with his new sculptural group is that it also shows Jonah in idyllic repose under the gourd vine, and includes a freestanding orant, probably Jonah, which Wixom calls "one of the most moving depictions of a figure in prayer in the entire history of art." It is thus the only such group in the world to portray the Jonah story from beginning to end. The works were probably commissioned by an unknown early Christian for a cubiculum. As for the artist, scholarship can only produce guesses; he was almost certainly Greek...
...hark: When brooding time doth atalk To August twelve, and heads are left gourd-dry The contest closes evermore...