Word: tone
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Tactics & Strategy. George Marshall drove himself and his colleagues hard. One incident was typical. Bevin suggested that the deputies for Austria be asked to submit their report. Molotov objected: "The Austrian deputies may not be prepared to report on such short notice." Whereupon Marshall snapped in his crispest military tone: "The American deputy will be ready." Half an hour later, the American deputy (General Mark Clark) was told at his hotel to make a progress report next day. Cried he, aghast: "We made a report on London. You mean progress here?" Then he stalked off to write a report...
Throughout, the impression was unavoidable that in both choice and interpretation of selections, too much stress was laid upon seeking works notable either for their historical significance or textual content. Tone, precision, sonority--the overall musical possibilities open to some 200 mixed voices were not given enough weight. In the final analysis, it is the sound of music which determines its worth, and the Harvard groups have been straying from this basic premise of late...
Conductor George Szell of the Cleveland Orchestra first got him interested in the A problem. What orchestras needed for tuning purposes, Pickering decided, was a pure, unvarying note with no overtones. No ordinary loudspeaker (and no musical instrument) emits pure tones: what comes out is a mixture of dominant tone and any number of overtones...
Pickering designed a special loudspeaker which would give a pure tone when fed an electric current pulsing at A-frequency (440 cycles a second). He sealed in a vacuum a carefully compensated tuning fork that is kept vibrating electrically. An amplifying circuit picks up the vibrations, feeds them to the loudspeaker. The result: a loud, true A. It is not a very musical sound, for it lacks softening overtones, but it is accurate to one one-hundred-thousandth of a cycle...
...audible on the air)-then abruptly stopped the orchestra. He thoughtfully rubbed his right cheek, told the orchestra to try again. Then he hid his face in his hands dramatically-with a look of resigned despair-and suddenly, in a hoarse, tragic voice, ordered the brasses to modify their tone...