Word: keyboard
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Borge also has a flair for slapstick. He falls off the piano bench, sits on the keyboard, or trips over the microphone, always unexpectedly and with a look of such complete surprise that it doesn't matter how many comedians have done it before. Borge concludes the evening with his phonetic puntuation routine, familiar now for a decade, and it could have been written that afternoon...
Another pianist, Walter Gieseking, has a horror of looking up from the keyboard and seeing somebody swaying in time to the music. Totten's suggested explanation: "It might make him seasick." The late great Tenor John McCormack "thought flowers were unmanly," and delivered himself of some spluttering Irish oaths when he was once pelted with roses. Conductor Arturo Toscanini has a still stronger aversion: "He thinks flowers are for dead...
Gieseking took his seat at the piano. With his thick shoulders hunched motionless over the keyboard and his heavy head bent reflectively, he had an air of a man determined to prove his case quickly. When he began to play a Mozart sonata, its contours were practically flawless, but the playing was so rigidly controlled that the effect was almost oppressive. Beethoven's Sonata Op. 110 was more relaxed, but it was only when he came to the impressionist music of Debussy and Ravel-billowing up tinted clouds of tone and lacing them with bright spiderwebs of melody-that...
...Grinnell Bros., for example, gives lessons to 120 Ford workers each week. In Chicago, the Kimball piano company makes things easy by distributing specially printed music in which the notes are indicated by little blocks of color. With the help of a colored cardboard strip inserted behind the piano keyboard, only the color-blind can fail to strike the proper chords...
Faster Adder. National Cash Register Co. brought out a new adding machine with a "Live Keyboard" that cuts down hand motions 35%. With all the keys electrified, the machine eliminates the add bar by automatically listing each figure, can add a ten-digit number in a single operation (compared to two to eleven operations on standard machines). Price depending on the size of the keyboard...