Word: keyboard
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Paul Wittgenstein, famed one-armed Austrian pianist, had made his U. S. debut with the Boston Symphony, playing a Concerto especially composed for him by Maurice Ravel. Bostonians closed their eyes because it seemed incredible that a single left hand could compass a keyboard so quickly and completely, make the treble sound clear and strong while the bass poured out a seething undercurrent. Compared with most pianists, Paul Wittgenstein has a fairly small hand. His trick was to train it to lightning speed, to develop his pedal technique so that he could cover transitions gracefully and subtly, give a solid...
...Herb Williams has made vaudeville audiences scream with delight by his quavering plea of "Spotlight!" from a dark stage. Sometimes billed as "The Bulgarian Military Pianist," he used to rummage for a ham sandwich under his piano lid, draw himself a glass of beer from a spigot beneath the keyboard. His comedy was generally of the tear-the-place-to-pieces variety...
...bearded bards in Wales were taking crwth (pronounced crowd) in hand, sawing a short bow over its strings, singing verses. When Henry VIII was dangling Anne Boleyn on his knees, he often called for his favorite virginal player, listened to thin tinkling music from a small piano-like keyboard. The "Three Musicians'' in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet (1594) regaled Elizabethans with harsh, screechy fiddling on rebecs. Milton and Pepys praised the pennywhistle notes of the fipple. Persians were plucking lutes before Attila ravaged Gaul. Crusaders brought dulcimers back to Europe with them from the East...
...piano, strikes an F sharp chord and painstakingly picks out the tune while a musical stenographer writes down the notes. Irving Berlin never had a music lesson. He plays by ear, in only one key. If he wants the effect of another, he turns a crank and the keyboard shifts...
...Paul Joseph Goebbels tries to make all news-organs play the same tune "like a great organ of many pipes," Organist Goebbels seemed unable to make up his mind about Roosevelt money, permitted a divergence of expression unprecedented since he sat down at the Fatherland's Press keyboard. Led by the Vossische Zeitung, one section of the German financial Press flayed President Roosevelt for "disturbing the world with a rubber dollar" expanding and contracting between 50? and 60?. Other equally authoritative papers echoed the Berlin Börsenzeitung's declaration that "President Roosevelt's return...