El Espagnol reports “The rocambolesque story of the psychiatrist who ‘scammed’ the US and was sentenced to play the piano“. The news article begins [here machine-translated from Spanish to English]: An American psychiatrist has recently been reprimanded by the US Government Office of Integrity in Research, after having already been convicted. His crime: steal several […]
Tag: piano
Fictophones – a curiously unstable class of musical instruments?
Does this video, showing sound sculptor Henry Dagg performing ‘Somewhere over the Rainbow’ on a Faux-Katzenklavier of his own construction, qualify as a fictophonic collapse scenario? First, some background. Musicologists often like to categorise instruments into classes or groups. For example – idiophones (vibrating bodies), membranophones (vibrating membranes), chordophones (vibrating strings), aerophones (vibrating […]
Medical advice for girls: Step away from the keyboard
From the Canada Lancet (1899), volume XXXI, no. 8, p. 1121: Neuroses from Piano Practice — Dr. Wartzold (in Jour. d’ Hyg.) blames abuse of the piano practice for the chlorosis and neuroses from which so many young girls suffer. Girls, he says, should not be compelled to hammer on the keyboard before they are […]
The Da Vince piano that maybe is mostly not a Da Vinci piano
Norman Lebrecht, writing in the Slipped Disk blog, debunks a piano, sort of: Leonardo’s instrument? No, it’s a reproduction of an obscure German contraption There has been much press hooh-hah about a bowed keyboard instrument imagined by Leonardo da Vinci and built by an enterprising Pole. But does it pass the acid test of musicology? Apparently not. […]