Word: instruments
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Strong as a Bull. Because good oboe players are scarce and because the instrument is extremely difficult to play, first oboists are often the most highly paid men in the orchestra, sometimes even better paid than the concertmaster. Most oboists make their own reeds, the shape and size of which largely determine the instrument's tone. Harold Gomberg, who has made trips to Europe in search of cane of the proper hardness, grain and color, maintains a studio where he spends dozens of hours a week whittling reeds to size (he uses as many as three reeds...
...Spin. Since Pioneer III never approached the moon, not all its instruments came into play. The most novel one was an optical gadget designed to send a radio signal when it saw a bright object the size of the moon at a distance of 22,000 miles. The instrument was shielded from the sun, and it would have been activated by a timing device only after the receding earth looked smaller than the approaching moon...
...that the Western powers have begun to arm West Germany and turn her into an instrument of their policy spearheaded against the Soviet Union," Moscow said, "the very essence of the Allied agreement on Berlin has vanished ... A patently absurd situation has thus arisen, where the Soviet Union is supporting and maintaining, as it were, the favorable conditions for the Western powers' activity against the U.S.S.R...
...together any desired number of persons; arrange their voices as in chorus. Play simple airs first, until you get acquainted with your instrument and with each other. It is so easy that in a few minutes you will play as well as if you had the instrument for years. The usual range of each voice has two octaves, hence an air sung by a bass voice lowest octave, by tenor or contralto at one octave above, soprano two octaves above. Every church without a paid choir should organize a Church Choir Band as a means of earning money for church...
Marius Constant is a fast-rising 33-year-old Parisian composer with a peculiar aural defect: he can never listen to a single instrument without mentally hearing all the instruments of the orchestra. This gets so bad, he complains, that "even when I play the piano all by myself, I hear strings and trombones, trumpets and percussion.'' Not long ago Composer Constant also found himself hearing tom-toms, marimbas, vibraphone and celesta. He committed these exotic cerebral sounds to paper, and last week a Parisian audience jammed into the Theatre des Champs-Elysées to hear...