Word: instrument
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Perhaps he found the demands of church music inimical to his own expressive needs. The church has always wanted voice-oriented music with the primary function of expressing devotional texts. Mozart's style, however, is instrument oriented. His church music tended to glorify itself at the expense of religious sentiment. For Mozart, the voice and the word were always secondary to the internal demands of the music...
Since the invention of the Hammond organ in 1935, hardly an instrument exists that has not been electrified. Piano, flute, violin, trumpet, drums -each has its own plugged-in cousin. Most conspicuous is pop-rock's king of instruments, the electric guitar. Ten years ago, from Engineering Physicist Robert Moog, came the Moog synthesizer, which first produced music through electricity alone. A nuclear-age superorgan, it looks like the offspring of a piano and a telephone switchboard...
Then along came the guitar synthesizer. "This guitar does not play a high E, it plays a high anything," claims its Inventor, Walter Sear, a Manhattan tuba manufacturer who worked with Moog for 18 years on the original synthesizer. His instrument looks like a guitar. It plays like one too. There ends the resemblance. Mating a solid-body Plexiglas Armstrong guitar with a Moog by means of an electric umbilical cord, Sear has created an instrument of virtually incalculable sound potential...
...cellist played an instrument with only three strings, and Messaien did his best on a piano with several broken keys. Together with a clarinetist and a violinist, heavily clothed against the extreme cold, they performed one of the masterpieces of 20th century chamber music for an audience of soldiers, workers, and farmers, their fellow prisoners of the Third Reich...
...with superficial aesthetical things, with shape," says Professor Herbert Lindinger of the Technical University of Hannover. "We European designers have been resentful of industrial strategies that have nothing to do with real needs, but with manipulated needs, and we are against the kind of styling that is merely an instrument to increase output and sales...