Word: keyboard
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...keyboard section: a cutbook of figure bass on the piano rack. Miss Vosgerchian points to a twomeasure sequence. "Identify the situation," she tells a student. Her eyes narrow. A tentative smile. She stares into his face to coax the answer out. "Identify," she repeats. "In two words tell what is happening. Isn't it a five-one situation?" The student nods. "Oh it's painful, isn't it," she croons...
...distinguished themselves as composers, referred to him as "the Old Wig." Today, of course, Bach is universally ranked among the transcendent creators of Western civilization. Choral works that he turned out for rowdy schoolboys to sing in drafty provincial churches are cherished by the world's finest choruses. Keyboard exercises that he jotted down for his children and students still beguile and challenge great virtuosos. Instrumental pieces that he com posed to curry favor with obscure princelings are judged among the glories of all chamber music...
...court conductor at Weimar, Bach landed a similar position with Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cothen; the defection so angered Duke Wilhelm that Bach was clapped in the Weimar jail for a month. Once he arrived at Cothen, Bach devoted five placid, productive years to superb keyboard and chamber pieces, including the French Suites for harpsichord, the unaccompanied music for cello and violin, and the six Brandenburg Concertos. This period is usually labeled Bach's secular phase, though he was not fussy about the distinction between sacred and secular. Bach often borrowed from his secular music for sacred occasions, just...
...later years, Bach gradually turned away from church composition and developed an even more austere and adventurous secular idiom, seemingly for his own satisfaction. He had always been a teacher, first to his children and then to paying pupils. He was one of the first keyboard instructors to introduce the use of the thumb and to advocate playing with curved rather than straight fingers. He told his composition students that contrapuntal lines should be like people in a conversation-each speaking grammatically, completing his sentences and remaining silent when he had nothing to add. Now, in the compositions...
...sacrificed some of the spontaneity and relaxation that Chopin's score invites. Weissenberg shrugs off the criticism that he is "an ice-cold interpreter, even an IBM machine," arguing that his emotionally objective approach is much sounder than that of pianists "who would nearly vomit on the keyboard to show that they are so sentimental and inspired. They have a sort of seasickness on stage...