Word: keyboards
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Rings & Springs. Early 19th century piano teachers were altogether baffled by the newfangled instrument. All sorts of torturous devices were invented for the purpose of getting the pianist's hands to the keyboard properly. Students' arms were clamped down with iron rails, their fingers wrapped with wires, rings and springs. Beethoven, flailing the keys like a startled bird, helped do away with such practices. He also did away with quite a few pianos, which in his day were rather fragile, spindle-legged affairs with 61 keys. When he performed, an assistant stood by to take out the broken strings...
...virtuoso living who can match his communion with the audience. "I love it like a woman," he says. His bearing becomes regal, his face is masked in concentration. His back erect, he kneads his fingers, bows his head for a moment's thought, and then eases into the keyboard. In driving home a run of climactic chords, he rises higher and higher off the piano bench as though he were intent on physically overwhelming the music. In more lyrical moods, his arms and hands move with a kind of gracefully looping symmetry, and always his eyes stare into space...
...years of "cleaning the piano's teeth," are spatula-shaped; the all-important little finger is as long as the index finger, which is just a shade shorter than the middle finger. Thus, with the extension of his long thumbs, he can encompass a twelve-note spread on the keyboard. Most pianists are happy if they can handle a tenth...
...unmentioned-that of a nursing baby. I listened to that through a Rubinstein concert. First the baby chewed on a rubber pacifier-that has a kind of squeak. Then there was a new sound and so help me, the mother was nursing her baby. Rubinstein looked right over the keyboard at us, and played sublimely on-possibly because he had become a father not too many years before...
Last month, at the White House par ty for Princess Margaret, Duchin sat at Lynda Bird's table until he had finished off his praline glace, then took his seat at the keyboard and kept Washington's ringleaders in step till...