Word: instrument
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...still occasionally noodle around playing Elizabethan ballads on my soprano recorder. But I do this in private because the recorder hasn't really been a "party" instrument since about 1685--hence my renewed interest in the piano. Just as every sociable grownup should be able to cook at least one tried-and-true meal, shouldn't she be able to play at least one song from memory, just in case she bumps into a baby grand...
...confrontation with Europe and the U.S. but harshly condemned NATO's air war and slammed Washington's aggressive support for the Serbian opposition this past year as "the kiss of death." He vowed not to deliver Milosevic to the Hague, calling the war-crimes tribunal an illegitimate instrument of U.S. hypocrisy. He was unsullied by Serbia's pervasive corruption. He did not cozy up to Milosevic as better-known opposition leaders had. "I've never even met him personally," he has said. When the ideological ragbag of Milosevic opponents looked around for someone to run, they picked Kostunica...
...performances from over the years featuring Bush and a cast of equally gifted guest performers. Among the most notable of these are newgrass veterans Jerry Douglas on dobro (who gets a great ride on "Girl from the North Country") and especially banjoist Bela Fleck, whose inspired playing puts the instrument through paces that Earl Scruggs could hardly have imagined...
...Although the guitar has long been the emblem of folk music, few of its early practitioners actually exploited the instrument beyond strumming chords in accompaniment. But among the few who did, Doc Watson stands as a monument of inventiveness and virtuosity. Now 77, Watson was the first to adapt the fiddle tunes at the core of the bluegrass idiom to the guitar, taking the instrument out of the background and putting it front and center, often solo, with a sparkling, rigorously precise flatpicking technique that is as fiendishly difficult as it is exciting - all the more remarkable for the fact...
This tendency has its penalties, as you may imagine. In the sixth grade, our teacher, having momentarily forced me to rejoin the class, asked anyone who had a musical instrument to bring it in and play it. As it happened, my aunt had bought me a guitar the day before, and though I had never played the guitar, I thought I'd do a few numbers. The next day I sat before my classmates, whose rising laughter nearly drowned out my one-chord rendition of Red River Valley. I just assumed that if I sat up there with my guitar...