Word: musicalities
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Most people know that George Bernard Shaw was once a music critic, writing for London papers under the name Corno di Bassetto (basset horn, a wind instrument). That he was also an amateur composer was revealed last week when Arthur Pforzheimer, Manhattan rare book dealer, exhibited manuscripts of two sweet Shaw songs, / Lack Thy Kisses and Here She Comes, written in 1884 to verses by a friend, a Miss Radford. > Last fortnight the Basle, Switzerland radio station broadcast a gay little opera buffa, La Contadina, by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, second-rank 18th-Century composer. Mislaid in the Brussels Royal Library...
...Round the Mulberry Bush were raging furiously among jazz musicians, Saxie Dowell fixed up the Southern song with some new verses, some boop-boops, a two-bar tune, repeated (with little variation) eight times. The result was published last April by Santly-Joy-Select, Inc., which got out The Music Goes 'Round and 'Round and admits to liking "crazy things." Under its title Three Little Fishies, Saxie Dowell's song last week had set something of a current record by leading the field in sheet music sales for a month...
...Camel cigarets, Lyricist Johnny Mercer wrote and sang a five-stanza Calypso-style greeting, set to Benny Goodman's music. Excerpts...
Last week the Wurlitzers, piano makers for 30 years, announced a 129% sales increase over the first five months of 1938, an all time record since neat German-born Rudolph Wurlitzer founded the company in 1856. Meanwhile, piano makers as a wholehardest-hit U. S. music industrialists during Depression-recorded a 30.5% sales increase over last year...
...this, its third sales peak period, the industry can also thank the music popularizers who lurk behind every microphone, in every film studio. First peak (365,000 sales) came in 1909, when most cultured U. S. families boasted a piano and tinkling was part of gentle breeding; second peak (343,000) in 1923, when 55% of sales were player pianos. When the industry created a taste for mechanical music, it bred the germ of its own decline. Player-piano addicts soon shifted to radios. Seven lean years and near-death followed. But meantime, radio, once the piano's ruin...