Word: tempo
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...woman deposited her mink coat and shawl on a stage table, set up her metronome, covered her shoulders with a sweater, and sat down at the concert grand. For the next two hours she worked from page to page of Beethoven's "Waldstein" Sonata, starting at dead-slow tempo, one hand at a time, working up to half tempo, patiently repeating certain figures again and again, uncovering little melodies hidden in the passagework, testing the spaces between chords for the precise measure of silence. Finally, humming cheerfully to herself, she went back and played it up to tempo, pouring...
...their anti-Fascist hero.* From party headquarters came a quick but lame explanation: Comrade Moscatelli had written the letter-without meaning a word of it-at party orders, in order to be set free to continue with "delicate" party work. This explanation was almost worse than none. II Tempo pointed out that Moscatelli had in fact earned his release by squealing on several comrades as soon as he was arrested. Added II Tempo: "The squealing paralyzed the party's activities in the region for many years...
While Desmond's horn sighs its fancies, Brubeck punctuates with syncopated figures, listening intently, now smiling secretly, now pursing his lips, ticking off the tempo with one brown suede shoe. When Desmond is through, Brubeck picks up the last idea and toys with it. He ripples along for a while in running melodic notes, builds up a sweet and lyrical strain, noodles it into a lowdown mood, adds a contrapuntal voice, suddenly lashes into a dissonant mirror-inversion, then subsides into a completely disconnected rhythm that momentarily garbles the beat. The listeners lose all contact with the original tune...
...table right in front of the bandstand-you know the sort that will order a whole bottle." Brubeck does not feel that way because he is egotistical but because he takes his work with a deep, almost mystical seriousness. When he is up on the platform, with the tempo whipping about his ears and no notion where the next idea will come from, he has a devout confidence that it will come-and it always does...
...dozen sizzling steaks), and his bass drum whaps out compulsively, unpredictably. Bates hunches closer to his bass. Desmond, his lips without their mouthpiece looking like a nearsighted man's eyes without his spectacles, moves quietly away from the piano. Brubeck seems to cut his ties with the tempo and tears off on a remote pulse of his own. He grabs huge fistfuls of notes, builds them into a sonata-size movement that ignores the divisions of the stock 32-bar chorus. The notes grow progressively more dissonant. Brubeck's head weaves in a wide arc. His fingers seem...