Word: ratchet
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...most colorfully exciting offering. Beginning with a stunning passage for bassoons, saxes, and solo horn, the composition also contains a lovely oboe solo, and an evocative passage for flute, piccolo, and bass drum side. In addition, Persichetti calls for hammer and anvil, four timpani, xylophone, sizzle cymbal, ratchet, marimba sticks on suspended cymbals, and bare hands on snare drum. At the end of the composition, all these returned in a brilliant overall unity...
Critical Changes. Strapped into the conical command module, trapped by hatches impossible to open, Virgil Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee scarcely had a chance. Now Apollo has only one hatch, and it can be opened with a ratchet from inside in about five seconds. The mechanism of the new, 70-lb. hatch, which Low says can be opened "with your little finger," is assisted by a cylinder of compressed nitrogen gas. Better for escape during ground tests, the quick-opening hatch also provides easier exit and re-entry during operations outside the spacecraft in flight. Moreover, it assures astronauts...
...instrument (which Mr. Avshalomov used in Milhaud's "Percussion Concerto") to which the reviewer referred as "a dilapidated Fourth-of-July noisemaker" is actually a respected piece of percussion paraphernalia known as a ratchet. Ratchets have delighted so many for so long that it is scarcely necessary to recall their grand history...
...real concern is the particular ratchet toward which the slander has been directed. This is no ordinary ratchet, but rather the new, carefully selected, exquisitely sensitive, four-pronged, concert ratchet, lent to Mr. Avshalomov by the Harvard University Band. This honorable and delicate instrument may be cranked at angular velocities up to eight pi radians per second. The timbre may be changed by altering the sense of rotation. The possible effects of the ratchet range from single thwacks to pulsating rolls and evenly sustained buzzing. Such awesome versatility is hardly common to "a dilapidated Fourth-of-July noisemaker...
...drastically altered orchestra: 17 string players were crowded off the platform to make way for a percussion section that had to man five timpani, three side drums, a bass drum, four kinds of cymbals, a tam-tam, three bongos, three temple blocks, a wood block, sandpaper blocks, rasp, whip, ratchet, triangle, maracas, claves, tambourine, chimes, glockenspiel, xylophone, vibraphone, celesta, piano and harp. Charles Munch, God bless him, conducted...