Word: instrument
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Birnbaum belongs to a musical family: his wife is a professional violist, one of his sons a pianist who also happens to practice law, the other son a flautist who is studying composition at Stanford. Birnbaum himself admits to playing the piano "badly." Can he play a stringed instrument? "Only a tennis racquet," says Birnbaum solemnly, "but I like fiddling with words...
Slava had been glorying for two weeks. For his season's opening the week before, he featured Rudolf Serkin in a velvety performance of Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto, creating a sensitive orchestral accompaniment to Serkin's ethereal tonalities. For the Bernstein concert, Slava took up his own instrument, while Lenny conducted his Three Meditations from "Mass" for Violoncello and Orchestra, an episodic piece that gave listeners a chance to hear Slava produce his exquisite cello sound, to watch his left hand flick across the finger board, his right arm streak like a bowing jet. Both programs were enlivened...
...complete, and often younger than she," Menuhin makes clear that his own career had less exciting origins. At two, his parents smuggled him into a matinee of the San Francisco Symphony; at four, unappeased by a toy violin ("this travesty of my longings enraged me"), he acquired his first instrument; by the time he was twenty he was an established master on both sides of the Atlantic...
Mingus, Carter's senior, was one of the '60s bassists who brought the bass into maturity as a jazz instrument, pioneering its use for improvisation, rather than solely rhythm. Mingus remains the most famous of these bassists, and is one of the few bass players now receiving acclaim for original composition...
...contemporaries established. Even early in his career, Carter was indebted to Mingus for giving the bass a major role in jazz improvisation. And yet, he did not follow Mingus into the avant-grade line of jazz; he did not abandon the classic role of the bass as a rhythm instrument...