Word: instrument
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...What we tried to say has often been misunderstood. . . . The referential use of language is the job of leading people to think about certain things--about this rather than about that--and to think in this sort of way rather than in that way. Reference is your main instrument for influencing people. You can also do it other ways...
...About the middle of the war, '42 or '43. It looked like the heaven-sent instrument. You could put pictures along with words and sentences. If you can get the eye and ear cooperating, you can do anything, I think. Television looked like the divinely appointed medium. So I got a little grant from the Rockefeller Foundation and I went to Walt Disney's studio to learn how to make cartoons...
...Krzysztof Penderecki to the U.S., revived neglected ones by Charles Ives and Ferruccio Busoni. Zukofsky's 1968 recording of Roger Sessions' Violin Concerto proved that the music was not only playable, which many a violinist had denied, but that it was perhaps the finest concerto for the instrument ever produced by an American composer...
Modern technology has spawned a new kind of instrument maker. The old craftsmen of music worked with wood, strings and valves; the new ones hook up wires, transistors and wave generators. The sounds the new products make are not echoes of the human voice but a bizarre collection of buzzes, bleeps and squawks. Nonetheless, the men responsible for them are the potential Stradivaris and Steinways of electronic music, and their forbiddingly complex instruments are made for the musicians of the future-who are destined to be as much composer-technicians as performers...
Foremost among the new instrument makers is Robert Moog, 34, an amateur musician with a Ph.D. in engineering physics from Cornell. The electronic synthesizer that bears his name -a 4-ft.-long contraption that looks like the control panel of a jet airliner with an organ keyboard grafted onto it-is by far the most effective device yet developed to produce electronic sounds. Besides serving as an "orchestra" for works by avant-garde composers, the Moog (rhymes with vogue) produced the bing-bong theme that for years preceded all CBS-TV color shows and the clarion call that heralds Westinghouse...