Word: keyboard
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...chubby little boy named Wood used to persuade the sextons of vast, dim London churches to let him climb up on the organ bench and poke his fingers into the triple-tiered keyboard. Later he studied at the Royal Academy, tried to be a composer, but it was not until he was engaged to conduct a series of Promenade Concerts in the new Queen's Hall in 1895 that his name began to command space in the newspapers. It was then considered impossible to play good music for audiences at Promenade Concerts; they wanted to hear Goodbye, Dolly...
...Frenchmen (Bonnard, Braque, Duffy, Seganzac, Laurencin, Marchand, Marquet, Matisse, Utrillo, Vlaminck) are all seduced by wonder, preoccupied with the intricacies of moods, of surfaces. The pinguid fingers of Matisse's Jenne Fille au Piano strike from the keyboard notes that drip with colored stridence, red like the shuddering walls, waxen yellow and scarlet like the overripe fruits on the table. Duffy's Trouville clutches the beach insecurely, as if at any moment it might balloon, mad with gaiety, into the seawind, and shatter its striped pavilions on the salvoing clouds. Bonnard's Le Palmier is a jungle as gemmed...
...harp-shaped shadow; no fiddlers tried their strings; no brisk conductor raised his arm. It was bare as Mother Hubbard's cupboard. At the back of this bare stage, there stood a huge screen, black-bordered; down by the footlights were certain metal boxes, each topped with a keyboard of sliding buttons. Before the concert began, a man made a speech. He was Thomas Wilfred, Danish singer, who invented the instrument so curiously composed of the metal boxes, the great screen. He explained his invention, the Clavilux or light-organ, that makes symphonies of colors. Then he played...
Since then, futuristic string-quartet composers have used quarter-tones, and really achieved genuine new effects with them. Expert violinists can manage them, with a little practice (beginners without any practice at all). At last, however, a quarter-tone piano keyboard has been invented, by one Alois Haba, a young Czech pupil of the daring Franz Schreker. His instrument was the chief exhibit at the International Music Festival held in Prague last month...
...first this young woman (a music teacher) is gauche, inept, stumbling amid polished floors and brilliant conversation. Astonishingly she sprouts wings. One talk with an aesthetic artist, and she decides to liberate her soul with a thump on the keyboard. She tosses off her inhibitions and a Chopin scherzo simultaneously. Result?she walks off with the fascinated Willie from under the very nose of a voluptuous vampire. It is a tribute to the power of ten-finger exercises...