Word: keyboard
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...strapping, hamhanded man with slicked-back hair and brooding mustache, Michelangeli ambled onstage with the baleful nonchalance of a boxer bent on mayhem. Once he settled at the keyboard, his touch was featherweight light, his attack crisp and restrained through Debussy's liquid Images and Beethoven's soaring Sonata in C Major (Opus 2, No. 3). After two encores and a dozen curtain calls, he unconcernedly ambled offstage to a standing ovation. Typically, following his triumph, he repaired last week to the regenerative quietude of a month-long teaching engagement at Siena's Accademia Musicale Chigiana. Untypically...
...every time. A high cover charge at the Jazz Workshop has resulted in audiences who are not really jazzlovers, and consequently performers play down to the audiences. (Jazz musicians are notoriously intolerant of audiences they dislike. Charles Mingus has been known--at college concerts--to do pushups on the keyboard and play "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling" straight.) And even Connaly's, which has been the best place in Boston for a long time, featured a big band and commercial singer a couple of weeks...
...Monique de la Bruchollerie, one of Europe's top concert pianists. Modern piano compositions have become so wickedly difficult to play that to get by today the pianist must be something of a contortionist-gyrating, flailing, crossing hands, crouching spread-eagle fashion to play both ends of the keyboard simultaneously. To rescue both piano and pianist from extinction, Monique has designed a new instrument-a kind of piano on the half shell...
Noting that watchmakers work at curved desks so that their tools are more accessible, she has designed a crescent-shaped keyboard that places the top and bottom keys within easier reach. In addition, she has converted the loud and soft pedals into bars extending the length of the curved keyboard. With feet freed from the center of the piano, she says, the pianist can then swing to either end of the keyboard without having to do a sitdown version of the twist...
...also proposes to tack on five notes at the bottom and ten notes at the top of the keyboard to expand the sound range of the standard piano (from 27.5 to 4,186 cycles per second) to come closer to the range of the human ear (from approximately 16 to 20,000 cycles). Her most far-reaching innovation is a pushbutton electronic system whereby the pianist can play from two to twelve notes simultaneously by striking one key. In effect, she says, this device "will give the player 30 fingers." It will also allow the piano to be "programmed" like...