Word: thumping
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Dates: during 1940-1940
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...American continent, an Indian picked up a sea snail's shell, blew a tentative toot. He had a horn. Perhaps he did not catch on at once, but his horn was tuned naturally to a pentatonic (five-note) scale. The Indian and his friends contrived other instruments to thump and tootle with the snail's shell. By the time the Aztec civilization was at its height, and the Spaniards arrived in Mexico, the Indians were playing teponaxtles (wooden cylinders, with tongues inside producing two different notes), huehuetls (tree-trunk drums), pipes and flutes of clay, rattles and rasps...
...reconstruction called Xochi-pili-Macuilxochitl after the Aztec god of music, the dance, flowers, love-was the real stuff. But it really sounded like an Aztec jam session. Flutes and pipes shrilled and wailed, a trombone (subbing for the snail shell) neighed an angular melody, to the spine-tingling thump-and-throb of drums, gourds, rattles. Xochipili-Macuil-xochitl sounded almost as primitive as Stravinsky...
...Denver, Reginald Scott Dean of the U. S. Bureau of Mines held up pieces of steel and brass, dropped them on the floor. They clanged. Mr. Dean then dropped a piece of another metal. There was a faint thump. This "noiseless" metal, as strong and elastic as mild steel, is a heat-treated alloy of copper and manganese. "This," said Metallurgist Dean, "opens up many new possibilities-chatterless spring suspensions, noiseless gears, a muffler for a whole host of bothersome industrial sounds...
...over, while the right hand goes to town with whatever variations the player can think up. Its form is identical with that of the classical passacaglia, a kind of dance music (of Spanish origin) that was old stuff to Bach's grandfather. Though boogie-woogie's mournful thump and clatter had long been heard in the humbler dives of New Orleans and Chicago, it was not taken up by the connoisseurs until 1938. In Manhattan the temple of boogie-woogie has been a subterranean Leftist cabaret in Greenwich Village called Café Society. Its high priests: Negroes Albert...