Word: zithers
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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Many of the pieces in Innocent Bystanding have appeared in Mr. Sullivan's column in the World and in the New Yorker. He takes a news item, a musical instrument (the zither, for example), an actress, an animal or the income tax and starts telling about it. Suddenly the reader becomes aware that Mr. Sullivan has left the ground and is loping around in a most ridiculous ether...
...book form they are not quite so funny. Artist Peter Arno created them with so few strokes of his charcoal and such a rare vein of middle-aged-female innuendo, that their gusto seems stifled when, located in a charity home, with a zither player, a retired fireman, an orphan oaf called Fester, a man with an elephant, and a Park Avenue dowager for companions, they become heroines of a story of which the dizziness does not compensate for the length. The upshot of the story is that Mrs. Flusser inherits $20,000,000 and the old gals pack...
...Carillo claimed he crowded 96 tones into a single octave. At Conductor Stokowski's command, specially trained musicians first produced on the familiar violin, cello and horn, intervals smaller than the semitone. Then new and strange gifts to Orpheus from Mr. Carillo were played: the arpacitera, a mastodonic zither, tuned in 16ths; the octavina, a towering double-bass guitar, capable of eighths; a guitarre adapted to produce quarter-tones...
...Manhattan not long ago came Julian Carrillo, composer, onetime director of Mexico's national conservatory. Composer Carrillo has a system all his own. He has substituted numbers for notes, written music in quarter, eighth and 16th tones, and perfected instruments to play them-an "arpacitera" or harp zither, having 97 tones within the octave in subdivisions of 16ths; a French horn, made in Manhattan, that plays 16ths; an "octavina" that plays eighths; a guitar that plays quarters; and an ordinary cello and violin on which were played quarters and eighths. Last week the League of Composers gave a concert...
...Karl Mikael Bellman was a Swedish poet of the 18th Century, a colossal bronze of whom adorns the public gardens of Stockholm. When the god was about to visit him, in the presence of his admirers, he would shut his eyes, take his zither, improvise music and words in praise of love and wine...