"Keyboard" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... it through to the very end, then rose, bowed from where he stood, stared round at the empty hall—a dreadful, strained, defiant smile stiffening upon his face—and sinking back upon his stool, laid his arms across the keyboard with a crash of notes, ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... Mrs. Rivington sat down and touched the keyboard. Then she looked around for silence, and it fell completely. All the eye-witnesses present are agreed that it was in the moment of this pause that the drawing-room door opened, and they heard the butler announce the name of ...
— The Prodigal Father • J. Storer Clouston
... "it's a little machine I got before I came down, with raised letters on the keyboard. If I progress at the rapid pace I have started, I'll be an expert before long. Mrs. Gusty was able to read five words out of ten ...
— Mr. Opp • Alice Hegan Rice
... confusion of rhythms, sudden contrasts from an overpowering tutti to the stridulous whirring of empty fifths on the violins, a trill on the flutes, or a dissonant mutter of the basses. The celesta, an instrument with keyboard and bell tone, contributes fascinating effects, and the xylophone is used;—utterances that are lascivious as well as others that are macabre. Dissonance runs riot and frequently carries the imagination away completely captive. The score is unquestionably the greatest ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... eidolons; a cave filled with Platonic phantoms. The phrase of Laforgue has a timbre capable of infinite prolongations in the memory. It is not alone what he says, nor the manner, but his power of arousing overtones from his keyboard. His aesthetic mysticism is allied with a semi-brutal frankness. Feathers fallen from the wings of peri adorn the heads of equivocal persons. Cosmogonies jostle evil farceurs, and the silvery voices of children chant blasphemies. Laforgue could repeat with Arthur ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... euphony of strong, easily and comfortably attained middle tones shall again be universally perceived. At the present moment our instrumental art has, in this particular, fallen under the tyranny of piano manufacturers and makers of wind instruments. When the keyboard of the grand piano has been made longer by a few keys, the composers think they are remaining "behind the times" if they do not immediately introduce these new high treble tones into their next work, and when ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... calendar and calculator utilities that circulate on {BBS} systems: unsociable. Used to describe a program that rudely steals the resources that it needs without considering that other TSRs may also be resident. One particularly common form of rudeness is lock-up due to programs fighting over the keyboard interrupt. See {rude}, ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... reader who may be interested enough to work out this little problem, along the lines of Shirley's deductions the arrangement of the so-called "Standard" keyboard is here shown, as it was on the "Number Four" machine of Warren's Remwood, and the duplicate machine ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... a swift glide up the notes, and other sounds were lost. The window was half open; the lawyer walked to it and looked out. At that moment the two men were back to back. Hugh Ritson's head was bent over the keyboard. Mr. Bonnithorne's eyes were on the tranquil landscape lying in the sun outside. The faces of both wore ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... Her soul now seemed to be flowing out through her fingers and to the keyboard; the music came not from the keyboard, really, but from ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... rested for a moment upon the keyboard of the piano before which she was seated, awaiting Lessingham's arrival. Then she glanced at the clock. It was ten ...
— The Zeppelin's Passenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... for this revolution Is plain; the keyboard, though its tones are cold, Viewed as a means of rapid "execution" Endears itself to Turks both ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 6, 1917 • Various
... in this night of spring, one was calling to its mate. The Commandant heard it, and struck its note on the upper keyboard. ...
— Young Hilda at the Wars • Arthur Gleason
... design is especially commended for the disposition of its ornament, and the delicate but vigorous lines of the bracket beneath the keyboard, or what is technically ...
— The Brochure Series of Architectural Illustration - Vol 1, No. 9 1895 • Various
... he liked any of the women to whom he would be fitfully agreeable upon the voyage. Once or twice, during each crossing, he did his best and made himself very charming indeed, to keep his hand in,—for the same reason that he kept a dummy keyboard in his stateroom, somewhere down in the bowels of the boat. He practised all the small economies; paid the minimum rate, and never took a deck chair, because, as Horace was usually in the cardroom, he could sit ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... Conferences with Renowned Masters of the Keyboard, Presenting the Most Modern Ideas upon the Subjects of Technic, Interpretation, Style ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... beautiful drawing-room at Whitestone Hall sat Pluma Hurlhurst, running her white, jeweled fingers lightly over the keyboard of a grand piano, but the music evidently failed to charm her. She arose listlessly and walked toward the window, which opened out upon the wide, cool, ...
— Daisy Brooks - A Perilous Love • Laura Jean Libbey
... a matted maze, Hand firm as iron, eyes all ablaze; Bystanders timidly, breathlessly gaze, As o'er the keyboard boldly he ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... themselves with zeal to try their 'prentice hands at the task of organ blowing. The church was open, and Monica was already waiting for them in the porch. She soon showed them how to work the bellows, and after telling them to stop and rest as soon as they were tired, seated herself at the keyboard and began her practice. Both the younger girls felt it a decidedly novel and interesting experience to be in the little space behind the pipes, working away at a long handle. As they took it in turns they were able to keep the organ ...
— The Manor House School • Angela Brazil
... come over the boy at the writing machine. His eyes were still glazed with the stupor of the hypnotic trance, but the slack jaw had stiffened, and the loose mouth was compressed in a purposeful line. As they watched, his hands went out to the keyboard in front of him and began to move over it, and as they did, letters appeared on the white screen ...
— Last Enemy • Henry Beam Piper
... keyboard became an indistinguishable blur Peters played on untiringly. But at last he rose, closed the piano and turned on an ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... L500, constructed so that he might have a better command of his performers, and he had also acquired another instrument, which Jennens calls a "Tubalcain"—in other words a set of bells played from a keyboard—which he intended to use in the scene in which the Israelites welcome David after his victory over the Philistines. It is curious that Handel should have dramatised the insanity of Saul just after he had himself recovered from ...
— Handel • Edward J. Dent
... rippling runs and sonorous harmonies filled the room to overflowing, as if under the fingers of the player there were—not the keyboard of a piano—but the violins, flutes, cornets, trombones, bass viols and kettledrums of a ...
— Miss Billy's Decision • Eleanor H. Porter
... Chopin himself, aristocrat of the soul as he was, would have received Diaz as an equal, might even have acknowledged in him a superior. For Diaz had a physique, and he had a mastery, a tyranny, of the keyboard that Chopin could not have possessed. Diaz had come to the front in a generation of pianists who had lifted technique to a plane of which neither Liszt nor Rubinstein dreamed. He had succeeded primarily by ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... through his veins, softly, warmly, creating a glow about his heart. Vistas then opened up before him. Romance and adventure beckoned him. . . . Later, when the stimulant reached the centers of his brain, like the sentient fingers of a musician touching the keyboard of his soul, it produced golden harmonies from those keys whose tones are love, rhythm, color, appreciation of the beautiful: Inhibitions melted away in the amber light that enfolded him. Lovely things he had read or seen or thought and kept to himself for lack of expression ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... Company, having meantime applied for a position as operator with the Western Union. He had to wait a few days, and during this time he seized the opportunity to study the indicators and the complicated general transmitter in the office, controlled from the keyboard of the operator on the floor of the Gold Exchange. What happened next has been the basis of many inaccurate stories, but is dramatic enough as told in Mr. Edison's own version: "On the third day of my arrival and while sitting in the office, the complicated general instrument ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... or did but I could never forget how she played for me on a great shiny piano—I had never seen one before—and made me feel very humble with music more to my liking than any I have heard since—crude and simple as it was—while her pretty fingers ran up and down the keyboard. ...
— The Light in the Clearing • Irving Bacheller
... unapt, but because she can't help it,—she is used to playing so, nobody ever taught her differently. I said to her mother and her that if I were her regular teacher, I would lock up all her music, cover the keyboard with a handkerchief, and make her practice both hands at first slowly on nothing but passages, trills, mordents, etc., until the difficulty with the left hand was remedied; after that I am sure I could make a real clavier player out of her. It is a pity; she has so much genius, reads respectably, ...
— Mozart: The Man and the Artist, as Revealed in his own Words • Friedrich Kerst and Henry Edward Krehbiel
... play of the machine, "Much hard that, I think, harder than bead-work, eh?" Conquering her timidity, she at last glides across to find out how the dickens when you strike capital "A" at one end of the keyboard, it finds itself in the writing next to small "o" at the other end. There is something uncanny about it, and our stock ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... down to the piano with a little quickening of the breath and let her fingers rest a moment on the keyboard. Then—sudden, crisp, and vigorous came the ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... ran over the instrument's keyboard, and I noticed that he touched only its black keys, which gave his melodies a basically Scottish color. Soon he had forgotten my presence and was lost in a reverie that I ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... facility in all keys is insisted on. Monsieur Jaques-Dalcroze's pupils learn to improvise with definite thought and meaning, nothing unrhythmical is ever allowed, nor any aimless meandering over the keyboard. For these lessons the pupils are divided into small groups of not more than six in each, and twice a week these groups are taken altogether by ...
— The Eurhythmics of Jaques-Dalcroze • Emile Jaques-Dalcroze
... passing the coffee, liqueurs and cigars, he was ready to answer any call. And thus it was that Thayor, amid general applause, led—or rather dragged—Jack triumphantly to the new grand piano, finally picking him up bodily and depositing him before the keyboard, where he held him on the stool with the grip of a sheriff, until this best of fellows raised his hands hopelessly and ...
— The Lady of Big Shanty • Frank Berkeley Smith
... over to the piano, sat carelessly, sidewise, on its stool, and, thrumming at the keyboard, fell to humming in a slurring, reminiscent fashion, the ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... entirely strange to Hamilton. It looked not unlike that of a big typewriter, or resembled even more closely a linotype keyboard, only it was divided off into sections each one of which was brightly colored, giving the arrangement of the keys quite a gay effect. The instructions were very clear, and with the machine in front of him the ...
— The Boy With the U.S. Census • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... days when Delancey Nicoll was the White Hope of the Brownstone Court House—declared Mr. Tutt's summation was the greatest that ever they heard. For the shrewd old lawyer had an artist's hand with which he played upon the keyboard of the jury and knew just when to pull out the stops of the vox humana of pathos and the grand diapason of indignation and defiance. So he began by tickling their sense of humor with an ironic description of afternoon tea at Mr. Hepplewhite's, with Bibby and Stocking as chief actors, ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... most melodious of all harmonies and the sentiment of love is innate. Woman is a delightful instrument of pleasure, but it is necessary to know its trembling strings, to study the position of them, the timid keyboard, the fingering so changeful and capricious which befits it. How many monkeys—men, I mean—marry without knowing what a woman is! How many of the predestined proceed with their wives as the ape of Cassan did with his violin! They have ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... known better. The man is a great critic, and, so far as I can make out, a good one; and how much criticism does it require to know that capitulation is not description, or that fingering on a dumb keyboard, with whatever show of sentiment and execution, is not at all the same thing as discoursing music? I wish I could believe he was quite honest with us; but, indeed, who was ever quite honest who wrote ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... stranger, I had been invited by the organist of the church to play the organ—a neat little instrument of some eight or ten stops; and it was while "giving out" the familiar tune of Antioch that I noticed, in the reflection of a little mirror placed above the keyboard, that Mr. Bronte had entered the church, and was passing up the aisle. He wore the customary black gown, and the lower part of his face was quite buried in an enormous white neckcloth—the most monstrous article of the kind I had ever beheld. The reflection in that little mirror I shall never ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... with a thirty-foot keyboard, forty-five octaves, and five hundred and twenty-two keys, which Mr. Alfred Butt will 'present' in 'Follow the Crowd' at the Empire Theatre, is now in course of construction. Six pianists will play it, and Mr. Irving Berlin, the composer of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, February 23, 1916 • Various
... extreme edge of the mountains, so that I could see underneath the soles of their boots as their legs dangled in the air. In the midst of all, a precipice that rose from out of the glaciers shaped itself suddenly into an organ, and there was one whose face I well knew sitting at the keyboard, smiling and pluming himself like a bird as he thundered forth a giant fugue by way of overture. I heard the great pedal notes in the bass stalk majestically up and down, like the rays of the Aurora that go about upon the face ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler
... discuss politics in country houses at election time (and at no other time) after their day's earnest and skilful shooting. Think of the years and years of weary torment the women of the piano-possessing class have been forced to spend over the keyboard, fingering scales. How many of them could be bribed to attend a pianoforte recital by a great player, though they will rise from sick beds rather than ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... drawbacks. He tries to sit on my book when I am reading, and longs to lie on the keyboard of my machine when I am writing. If I try to read a paper when he is on my lap he immediately crawls under it, and gets between my eyes and the print. I am terribly flattered, but his affection has its ...
— On the Edge of the War Zone - From the Battle of the Marne to the Entrance of the Stars and Stripes • Mildred Aldrich
... something in his voice that piqued the cantatrice, something that sent her back to the days of short frocks. She glanced nervously aside at Harry, who had struck a few notes and then dropped his hands from the keyboard. Twemlow's demeanour towards the blushing Ethel when Leonora brought her forward was much more decorous and simple. As for Harry, to whom his arrival was a surprise, at first rather annoying, Twemlow treated the young buck as one man of the ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... ever bright and fair" into a lower key, so as to make it suit her voice, thus proving, as her mamma said, that she had a thorough knowledge of the laws of harmony; not only did she do this, but at every pause added an embellishment of arpeggios from one end to the other of the keyboard, on a principle which her governess had taught her; she thus added life and interest to an air which everyone—so she said—must feel to be rather heavy in the form in which Handel left it. As for her governess, she indeed had been a rarely ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... are pain, And discord mars our harmonies: Our strings are snapped by selfish strain, And harsh hands break our keys. But God meant music; and we may, If we will keep our lives in tune, Hear the whole year sing roundelay, December answering June. God ever at his keyboard plays, Harmonics, right; and discords, wrong: "He that hath ears," and who obeys, May ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... spoke of evolution from harpsichord or spinet to the modern instrument; its yellow keys, from which the ivory in some cases was missing, and its high back, stained silk front, and fretted veneer indicated age; while above the keyboard a label, now growing indistinct, set forth that one "William Harper, of Red Lion Street, Maker of piano-fortes to his late Majesty" was responsible for the instrument very ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... gasped. Her arms went out instinctively across the keyboard, as if she would protect the ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... leaves of the instructor, she found the simple chords of "Annie Laurie," and wrote beside each note the letters that would enable Agnes to find them on the keyboard. "This isn't the right way to begin," she said, with a laugh, "but we'll take this short cut just to surprise Miss Marietta. You can come back aftahward and learn about time and all the othah things that ...
— The Little Colonel's Christmas Vacation • Annie Fellows Johnston
... sir." Verkan Vall snapped on the code-index, found the symbol he wanted, and then punched it on the keyboard. "Special Chief's Assistant Verkan Vall," he identified himself. "Speaking from office of Tortha Karf, Chief Paratime Police. I want a complete hypno-mech on Venusian nighthounds, emphasis on wild state, special emphasis domesticated ...
— Police Operation • H. Beam Piper
... up to the piano, where Mr Armstrong, still in the clouds, was roaming at will over the chords, and laid his father's letter on the keyboard. ...
— Roger Ingleton, Minor • Talbot Baines Reed
... on to it like a whirl of soap-suds in a hand-basin. Then she pushed up her cuffs as if she was going to fight for the champion's belt. Then she worked her wrists and her hands, to limber 'em, I suppose, and spread out her fingers till they looked as though they would pretty much cover the keyboard, from the growling end to the little squeaky one. Then those two hands of hers made a jump at the keys as if they were a couple of tigers coming down on a flock of black-and-white sheep, and the piano gave a great howl as if its tail had been trod on. Dead stop—so still you could hear your ...
— Little Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor - Volume I • Various
... P.m. The first proper name ever set by this new keyboard was William Shakspeare. I set it at the above hour; & I perceive, now that I see the name written, that I either misspelled it then ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... the sympathetic stroke of which has been felt by many men and many women. It is at once a light which lightens the darkness of the future, a presentiment of the sacred joys of a shared love, the certainty of mutual comprehension. Above all, it is like the touch of a firm and able hand on the keyboard of the senses. The eyes are fascinated by an irresistible attraction; the heart is stirred; the melodies of happiness echo in the soul and in the ears; a voice cries out, "It is he!" Often reflection casts a douche of cold water on ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... accomplished, he returned A lonely pilgrim to the twilit shrine Of first beginnings and his father's youth. There, in the Octagon Chapel, with bared head Grey, honoured for his father and himself, He touched the glimmering keyboard, touched the books Those dear lost hands had touched ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... the keyboard instruments, into the middle of which the five theremin-players had been stuck for no reason at all. The strange howls of this unearthly instrument filtered through the sound of pianos, harpsichords, psalters, clavichords, virginals and three gigantic ...
— Pagan Passions • Gordon Randall Garrett
... the resonance factor; and the bridge, connecting it with the strings. The strings, sound-board, and bridge are indispensable, and common to all stringed instruments. The special fact appertaining to keyboard instruments is the mechanical action interposed between the player and the instrument itself. The strings, owing to the slender surface they present to the air, are, however powerfully excited, scarcely audible. To make them sufficiently audible, their pulsations ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various
... vibration of one or two hundred or thousand per second; in other words, we can excite a pure tone of definite pitch; and we can demand any desired range of such tones continuously by means of bellows and a keyboard. We can also (though the fact is less well known) excite momentarily definite ethereal vibrations of some million per second, as I have explained at length; but we do not at present seem to know how ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 717, September 28, 1889 • Various
... another range than the one needed for their earlier efforts. But it is an open question whether the performer's instrument really changed. It must either have been wrongly classified at one of the two periods, or the vocal keyboard—so to speak—transposed a little higher or lower. The character of the instrument remains the same; a viola strung as a violin would still retain its viola quality ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... back in a long chair close at hand. The moment was propitious. The artist's profile silhouetted itself against the shade of a light that burned at the side of the organ, and that gave light to the keyboard. And on this keyboard, full in the reflection, lay his long, slim hands. They were the only things that moved in the room, and the chords and bars of Mendelssohn's "Consolation" seemed, as he played, to flow, not from the instrument, ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... to the keyboard, and the aged machine clattered rapidly for nearly a minute before Dr. Joachim paused again to consider his ...
— Fifty Per Cent Prophet • Gordon Randall Garrett
... intelligence, and, besides being a great musician, he made organs of lead with his own hand. In S. Domenico he made one of cardboard, which has ever remained sweet and good; and in S. Clemente there was another, also by his hand, which was placed on high, with the keyboard below on the level of the choir—truly with very beautiful judgment, since, the place being such that the monks were few, he wished that the organist should sing as well as play. And since this Abbot ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 3 (of 10), Filarete and Simone to Mantegna • Giorgio Vasari
... his cheeks, as he touched the keys softly and lingeringly. He could go no further than the refrain; he leant his elbows on the keyboard, and dropped his head upon his arms. The clashing notes jarred like a hoarse cry, then vibrated slowly away into a silence that was broken only by his sobs. He rose late the next day, after a sleep that was one prolonged nightmare, full of agonised, ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... (sharp) akra. Keep teni, gardi. Keep silence silentigxi. Keeper gardanto. Keepsake memorajxo. Keg bareleto. Kennel hundejo. Kernel kerno. Kettle bolilo. Key sxlosilo. Key (of piano, etc.) klavo. Keyboard klavaro. Keystone cxefsxtono. Kick piedfrapo. Kid kaprido. Kidnap forsxteli. Kidney reno. Kill mortigi. Kill (animals) bucxi. Kilogramme kilogramo. Kilolitre kilolitro. Kilometre kilometro. Kin parenceco. Kind (species) speco. Kind bona. Kindle ekbruligi. Kindness ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... dropped on the keys with the lightness of a feather. They rose and flashed and twinkled, and ran along the keyboard with swift, steel-like touch. The door at the end of the room opened softly. A tall man entered. He looked inquiringly at the grotesque green-and-white figure seated before the piano, then his glance met his wife's, and he sank into a big chair by the door, a pleased look on his ...
— Unfinished Portraits - Stories of Musicians and Artists • Jennette Lee
... confined beneath a glass dome. It looked rather like a groundhog and had seven fingers on each of its six limbs. But it was larger and hairier than the glass one he had seen at the gift store. With four of its limbs it tapped on an intricate keyboard in front of it. ...
— The Perfectionists • Arnold Castle
... remove, and which the occupying soldiers have found no use for. The most notable of these articles is a musical instrument, which may be described as a compound harp-organ. It is, in fact, an upright harp, played by keys which strike the wires by a pianoforte action, which has an ordinary piano keyboard. This is, in fact, the earliest form of the modern pianoforte. Then, in the same instrument is an organ bellows and pipes, the music from which is evoked by means of a separate keyboard, the bellows ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... retained its health he was at a loss when it developed ailments; and to these it was prone, being a machine of temperament and airs, inclined to lose spirit, to sulk, even irritably to refuse all response to Dave's fingering of the keyboard. Dave was sincerely startled when his son one day skillfully restored tone to the thing after it had disconcertingly rebelled. Sam Pickering, on the point of wiring for the mechanic who had installed his treasure, looked upon the boy with awe as his sure hands wrought knowingly ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... she said, 'but it is not necessary. I found two five-franc pieces at the back of the piano, that had slipped without your knowledge between the frame and the keyboard, and I ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... then concentrates steadily on the phenomena of the astral plane. For that matter, the skilled and advanced occultist is able to function on the astral plane by simply shifting his consciousness from one plane to another, as the typist shifts from the small letters of the keyboard to the capital letters, by a mere pressure on the shift-key of ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... down at my hands. No delicateness there; certainly those fingers, though white enough nowadays, and long enough, too, were not made for fancy work and parlor tricks. They would have looked in place round the handle of a spade or the throttle of an engine, while Sam's seemed made for the keyboard of a piano. ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... legato playing, and desires everything to be studied slowly, with deep touch and with full, clear tone. For developing strength he uses an exercise for which the hand is pressed against the keyboard while the wrist remains very low and motionless and each finger presses on a key, bringing, or drawing out as much ...
— Piano Mastery - Talks with Master Pianists and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... by throwing his brush at a picture in rage and despair; of a musician who, after repeated failures in trying to imitate a storm at sea, obtained the result desired by angrily running his hands together from the extremities of the keyboard,—bear in mind that even this "luck" came to men as the result of ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... of admiration fell from many lips. For an instant Helen Young's hands poised above the keyboard, then descended; and as spontaneously as a bird begins its love song to the blue, so ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... fetched a swoop with her fingers from one end of the keyboard to the other, just to get her bearings, as it were, and you could see the congregation set their teeth with the agony of it. Then, without any more preliminaries, she turned on all the horrors of the "Battle of Prague," that venerable shivaree, and waded ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... ago all type was set in this manner; but several machines have now been invented which will do this work. In one of the best of them the operator sits before a keyboard much like that of a typewriter. When he presses key a, for instance, a mould or matrix of the letter a is set free from a tube of a's, and slides down to its place in the stick. At the end of the line, the matrices forming it are carried in front ...
— Makers of Many Things • Eva March Tappan
... with a crash on the keyboard. Then, in a low swift rush: "Thea, you don't mean it—you're ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... red hat. Next door, the facade of the upper stories had been shelled away and the naked interiors gave the impression of a pathetic doll's house. Women's garments still hung on pegs. A cottage piano lurched forward drunkenly on three legs, with the keyboard ripped open, the treble notes on the ground, the bass incongruously in the air. In the attic, ironically secure, hung a cheap German print of blowsy children feeding a pig. The wide flagstoned street smelt sour. At various cavern doors sat groups of the billeted soldiers. ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... colour and form, of all pictures, as the keyboard contains the notes of all music. But the artist is born to pick, and choose, and group with science, these elements, that the result may be beautiful; as the musician gathers his notes, and forms his chords, until he bring forth from ...
— The Mind of the Artist - Thoughts and Sayings of Painters and Sculptors on Their Art • Various
... in. thick for body. Nail on piece 1/2 x 1/2 for keyboard. Draw keys on paper and ...
— Primary Handwork • Ella Victoria Dobbs
... "Honest now I mean it. If I win this election and get this job for the two years of unexpired term, you'll be court stenographer—pays fifteen hundred a year." The girl glanced quickly at him again, with fire in her eyes, then looked conspicuously down at the keyboard of ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... the building. All three instruments were under control of the organist at the console located upon the main floor of the entrance hall, and could be played either by hand or by music rolls manufactured by the Aeolian Company. The organ was equipped with an electric keyboard which permitted the playing of all three instruments or any single one, as the operator desired. The main instrument was contained in an artistic case, which, with its decorative ornament, was built by Charles and Jacob Blum, of New York city, and was ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis
... curtain, and played an accompaniment to the music box on the guitar. We could see plainly the movements of the hand, arm, and fingers, as it manipulated the strings of the instrument. It did not appear necessary to finger the strings on the keyboard, although the air was in a key that made it impossible to tune the guitar so that an accompaniment could be performed WITHOUT fingering. However, but one hand was visible, and it was picking the strings. ...
— The Lock and Key Library/Real Life #2 • Julian Hawthorne
... dreams at the piano—large flakes falling direct to the ground and lingering there like measured notes; and little white coveys suddenly eddying hither and thither, like aimless runs up and down the keyboard. ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... costly oil paintings. Over Editor Woodsit's desk appears the legend, "The Pen Is Mightier Than the Sword." Near the desk are rows of nickel-plated tubes, about six feet in height and two feet in diameter; the lids or covers to these tubes are opened by means of a keyboard in front of the editor. The tubes themselves contain the heads of the departments of ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field
... colored lights. The system in use in the United States Navy is known as the Ardois system. In this system the messages are sent by four lights, usually electric, which are suspended from a mast or yard-arm. The lights are manipulated by a keyboard situated at a convenient point on the deck. A red lamp is flashed to indicate a dot in the Morse code, while a white lamp indicates a dash. The Ardois system is also used by the Army. The perfection of wireless telegraphy has caused the Ardois and other signal systems depending ...
— Masters of Space - Morse, Thompson, Bell, Marconi, Carty • Walter Kellogg Towers
... I noticed something new just beside the door: a high-legged, short-keyboard piano. Then I saw that the legs were those of a table. The piano was just a box with ...
— No Great Magic • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... window, she picked up her last vase of flowers, a single branch of apple blossoms in a tall, green jar, and, crossing over to the grand piano so placed it that the sunlight shone full upon it. Then she stood for a moment looking thoughtfully at the open keyboard, which had a small sheet of music spread before it. Esther Clark next sat down at the piano and lightly ran her fingers over the keys so that it could scarcely have been possible for any one farther away than the adjoining hall to have ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at Sunrise Hill • Margaret Vandercook
... means high, and on the neck, low," Johnny promptly finished his code. Having thus made a code keyboard of Bland's person, he settled himself ...
— Skyrider • B. M. Bower
... keyboard. Hardly daring to lift them, she followed up the air with a wild variation and dropped back upon it again—not upon the air pure and simple, but upon the air as it might be rendered by a two-thirds-intoxicated coachful of circus bandsmen. The first half-a-dozen bars tickled Miss Sally ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... sunny-climes, easy to imagine as laughing and frolicking beneath their cocoa-trees and now more distressing to behold than the rest in their glacial, mute condition. In the background, before the piano, was the death-mask of the old diplomat, his mittened hands resting inert upon the keyboard, the yellowing tones of which were reflected on ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet
... the usual demurrings from Ada, rather prettily pink, and Mrs. Turkletaub, with the threat of sobs swallowed, opening the upright piano to dust the dustless keyboard with her apron, and Nicholas, his sagging pipe quickly supplied with one of the rose-twined cuspidors for ash receiver, hunched down in the pink-velour armchair of enormous ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... he turned out the kerosene lamp, which was sputtering, and flung fresh logs upon the hearty fire. Overhead the rain droned, like monotonous fingers upon a keyboard, and beside her Sandy slept ...
— The Innocent Adventuress • Mary Hastings Bradley
... Malines, The master of the bells unseen Has climbed to where the keyboard stands,— To-night his heart is in his hands! Once more, before invasion's hell Breaks round the tower he loves so well, Once more he strikes the well-worn keys, And sends aerial harmonies Far-floating through the twilight dim In patriot song and ...
— The Red Flower - Poems Written in War Time • Henry Van Dyke
... reporter has of a knowledge of the structural mysteries of his typewriting machine. The office mechanic fixes all that for him, and, so far as his efficiency as a reporter is concerned, an investigation of his faithful keyboard's internal arrangements would be in most cases an amiable waste ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... else, dear friend, when God sends a pretty fool to listen!" She looked up at him from the keyboard over which her hands were nervously wandering. "I ought to know," she said; "I also have listened." She laughed carelessly, but her glance lingered for an instant on his face, and her mirth did not sound quite spontaneous ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... was speaking to you about," said Captain Bob, pointing to a wounded Highlander, whose head was enveloped in a bandage. "He's a regular genius on the keyboard; that is why there are such a lot of chaps here to-night. He only blew in a couple of days ago from the brigade on our right when he heard we were lucky enough to have ...
— With Haig on the Somme • D. H. Parry
... odd, knowledgeable way men has with new buildin's. The Ladies' Aid had got the floor broom-clean, an' the lamp-chandelier filled an' ready; an' the foreign pipe-organ that the Proudfits had sent from Europe was in an' in workin' order, little lookin'-glass over the keyboard an' all. It seemed rill home-like, with the two big stoves a-goin', an' the floor back of 'em piled up with the chunks Peleg Bemus had sawed for nothin'. Everything was all redded up, waitin' for ...
— Friendship Village • Zona Gale
... benedictions of ages, poured forth melody to the touch of one whose playing was simple, but of the soul. We sat silently among the graves as the rays of the dying sun brought to life new colouring in the leaded windows of stained glass behind which a soldier of France swayed at the ivory keyboard and with heavenly harmony ignored those things of death and destruction that might arrive through the air ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... me—was soon condemned to isolation. No one would associate with me during play-time. No one would sit beside me in the school-room. At the piano lesson, the girl who played after me pretended to wipe the keyboard carefully before commencing her exercises. I struggled bravely against this unjust ostracism; but all in vain. I was so unlike these other girls in character and disposition, and I had, moreover, been guilty of a great imprudence. I had been silly enough to show my companions ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... white respectively. By the combination of these lights letters can be formed, and so, letter by letter, a word, and thence an order, can be spelled out for the guidance of the ships of a squadron. The lamps are worked by a keyboard generally placed on the ...
— A Gunner Aboard the "Yankee" • Russell Doubleday
... suggestion—because we love each other. That made the difference." He drew Annette's head closer on his shoulder. "I'm going to take her away to-night. She's done with all this." He turned to Mrs. Markham. Her hand still rested on the keyboard. Her face was pale, but her lips wore a sneering smile. "It is your ...
— The House of Mystery • William Henry Irwin
... his best verses, and Milton at the keyboard of his organ. Shakespeare's language is no longer the mere vehicle of thought; it has become part of it, its very flesh and blood. The pleasure it gives us is unmixt, direct, like that from the smell of a flower or the flavor of a fruit. Milton ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... the salone, Browning was seated at the piano, playing (I think) a Toccata of Galuppi's. On seeing us, he brought his hands down with a great crash on the keyboard, seemed to reach us in one astonishing bound across the marble floor, and clapped Ibsen loudly on either shoulder, wishing him "the ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... understanding, and turned to the keyboard. Then, without notes, and with a delicate touch of perfectly modulated interpretation, she began to render "Trauemerei," as though she, too, had been dreaming of something that might ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... required a strong man to ring them, these can be rung from an electric keyboard, and even when rung by hand require but little muscular power to manipulate them and call forth all the purity and sweetness of their tones. The quality of tone is something superb, being rich and mellow. ...
— Pulpit and Press • Mary Baker Eddy
... what I had taken for the keyboard of the organ was no keyboard but only a slit, and one of the little Lords dropped a plaque of metal into it. And then the angels played and the world turned round and the organ made a noise and the people began killing one another and the ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... piano, a perfect room for banquetting. The lieutenant opened the piano with his sword, and before Theodore knew where he was, he was sitting on the music-stool, and his hands were resting on the keyboard. ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... her with his eyes, from the golden crown of her rigidly motionless head to the heels of her shoes, the line of her shapely shoulders, the curves of her fine figure swaying a little before the keyboard. She had on a light dress; the sleeves stopped short at the elbows in an edging of lace. A satin ribbon encircled her waist. In an access of irresistible, reckless hopefulness he clapped both his hands on that waist—and ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... the yellow sitting-room it was the mulatto maid who waited. Her white teeth shining like a keyboard, she pushed back the sliding doors and ushered him into ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... not looking at the music before her, but up at nothing, while her hands ran over the keyboard, playing an old sailor's "chantey" which Lowell has taught us. It carries with it all the sweep and murmur of the ...
— Captain Macklin • Richard Harding Davis
... entrances and exits. She was not there. He ate little, quickly, watchfully. She did not come. He lingered in the lounge over his coffee, drank two liqueurs of brandy. But still she did not come. He went over to the keyboard and examined the names. Number twelve, on the first floor! And he determined to take the note up himself. He mounted red-carpeted stairs, past a little salon; eight-ten-twelve! Should he knock, push the note under, or....? He looked furtively round and turned ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... subdued sympathetic melody, and then, just as the music seems almost divine, the long cat-like squeal which ends it all—much like an old organist and choirmaster of boyhood days who used to break in with a horrible discord at the lower end of the keyboard when the anthem rehearsal wasn't going ...
— Some Spring Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... returned nonchalantly, "if I can only have my hands in my pockets, or waving in the air, or anywhere but on a keyboard." ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... obediently to the instrument. He watched her for a few moments from the toe of her kid slipper on the pedals to the swell of her shoulders above the keyboard, with a strange, abstracted face. Presently she stopped and came ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... piano she sat down on the stool, while he took a small chair and established himself near the corner of the instrument, at the upper end of the keyboard. The shaded lamp cast a little light on both their faces, as the two looked at each other, and Margaret realised that she was not only very fond of him, but that his whole existence represented something she had lost and wished to get back, but feared that she could never have ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... the hand and led him to the keyboard of the organ, at which the young fellow seated himself prettily, after the manner of women. "Ah! sweet coz," cried Bertha, as soon as the first notes tried, the lad turned his head towards her, in order that they ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... empty-headed as an average successful painter. Again, consider our implements of music—our pianofortes, for example. Nobody but an acrobat will voluntarily spend years at such a difficult mechanical puzzle as the keyboard, and so we have to take our impressions of Beethoven's sonatas from acrobats who vie with each other in the rapidity of their prestos, or the staying power of their left wrists. Thoughtful men will not spend their lives acquiring sleight-of-hand. ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... accompanied by the great singer Pacchierotti. He was received with the greatest favor by the queen, Marie Antoinette, and the court, and made the acquaintance of Gluck, who warmly admired the brilliant player who had so completely revolutionized the style of execution on instruments with a keyboard. Here he also met Viotti, the great violinist, and played a duo concertante with the latter, expressly composed for the occasion. Clementi was delighted with the almost frantic enthusiasm of the French, so different from the more ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... least of all the art of letters. Apply the musical analogy once more to the instrument whereon literature performs its voluntaries. With a living keyboard of notes which are all incessantly changing in value, so that what rang true under Dr. Johnson's hand may sound flat or sharp now, with a range of a myriad strings, some falling mute and others being added from day to day, ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... her recent illness; her nerves were excited by the unusual pleasure she felt in playing once more with her husband, and this sudden shattering of her hopes of a renewed tenderness proved more than she could bear: she put her head between her hands upon the keyboard and broke into a ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner
... the first time he had heard the sonata played. He knew that his memory of the piano falsified still further the perspective in which he saw the music, that the field open to the musician is not a miserable stave of seven notes, but an immeasurable keyboard (still, almost all of it, unknown), on which, here and there only, separated by the gross darkness of its unexplored tracts, some few among the millions of keys, keys of tenderness, of passion, of courage, of serenity, which compose it, each one differing from all the rest as ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... circumstance is supposed to derive its name. Queen Elizabeth was fond of playing on it, but as it was in vogue before her time, there is no need to connect the name with the Virgin Queen. (Elizabeth's own Virginal is in South Kensington Museum.[10]) Its keyboard has four octaves, and the case is square, like that of a very old pianoforte. The strings of the virginal were plucked, by quills,[11] which were secured to the 'jacks' [see Sonnet cxxviii.], which in turn were set in motion by the keys. The strings were wire. The oldest country dance known, ...
— Shakespeare and Music - With Illustrations from the Music of the 16th and 17th centuries • Edward W. Naylor
... well with Royal persons! I have heard a very great Majesty indeed praise a common little American woman's abominable singing, as though she were a prima-donna, and saw him give a jewelled cigar-case to an amateur pianist, whose fingers rattled on the keyboard like bones on a tom-tom. But then the common little American woman invited his Majesty's 'cheres amies' to her house; and the amateur pianist was content to lose money to him at cards! Wheels within wheels, my friend! In a lesser degree the stock-jobber who sets ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... keyboard set in the control room of the Comet and stared down at the keys. The equation was set and ready. All he had to do was tap that key and they would know, beyond all argument, whether or not they had dipped into the ...
— Empire • Clifford Donald Simak
... balustrade into that lower room, Captain Folsom saw the singer seated at a great square piano, a giant of a man with a huge shock of dark brown hair and ferocious mustaches, while a coal black negro, even huger in size, lolled negligently at one end of the keyboard, his red lips parted wide in a grin of enjoyment and ivory white teeth showing between, and at the other end of the piano, with his elbows planted on the instrument and his head pressed between his hands, stood or rather leaned ...
— The Radio Boys with the Revenue Guards • Gerald Breckenridge
... Chopin, a mere boy, used to amuse himself by searching on the piano for harmonies of which the constituent notes were widely scattered on the keyboard, and, as his hands were too small to grasp them, he devised a mechanism for stretching his hands, which he wore at night. Fortunately, he did not go so far as Schumann, who made similar experiments with his hands and thereby disabled one of ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... this one," he said, indicating a handsome brunette, "is a magnificent piano. Best workmanship and superior materials employed throughout. Splendid tone and light touch. Price, one hundred guineas. Examine it; try it for yourself, Sir." And he opened the keyboard as ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 27, 1914 • Various
... corner; and be careful to stop her in time, I should hate to push a piano through one of my host's parlor walls just for the want of a little care. (They push until the piano stands against the wall on the other side of the room, keyboard in.) There! That's first-rate. You can put a camp-chair on top of it for the prompter to sit on; there's nothing like having the prompter up high, because amateur actors when they forget their lines, ...
— The Bicyclers and Three Other Farces • John Kendrick Bangs
... the average husband to an orang-utan trying to play the violin. "Love, as we instinctively feel, is the most melodious of harmonies. Woman is a delicious instrument of pleasure, but it is necessary to know its quivering strings, study the pose of it, its timid keyboard, the changing and capricious fingering. How many orangs—men, I mean, marry without knowing what a woman is!... Nearly all men marry in the most profound ignorance of women and of love" (Balzac, Physiologie ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... the sunlight played in the tip, she could see the golden and reddish lights of the cypress twigs through the deep green. On her knees she held a large musical instrument all made of ivory, and inlaid with black, a lute with eleven strings, but of the shorter kind with the head of the keyboard turned back at a right angle. It lay in her lap, in the ample straw-coloured folds of her silk skirt, and its broad white ribband was passed over her shoulder, and pressed on her lace collar on the left side ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... the mazurkas of Chopin. He was, as Rubinstein called him, "the soul of the pianoforte." No one before or after him knew how to make that instrument speak so eloquently. By ingeniously scattering the notes of a chord over the keyboard while holding down the pedal, he practically gave the player three or four hands, and greatly enlarged the harmonic and coloristic possibilities of the pianoforte. Liszt, Rubinstein, Paderewski, and others ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... more from Haydn than a tempest on the keyboard. He had written the libretto of an opera, "Der Neue Krumme Teufel," and desired that Haydn should set it to music. The chance was too good to be thrown away, and Haydn proceeded to execute the commission with alacrity, not a little stimulated, doubtless, by the ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... the dawn of speech the child ceases to be an animal we cherish, and crosses the boundary into distinctly human intercourse. There begins in its mind the development of the most wonderful of all conceivable apparatus, a subtle and intricate keyboard, that will end at last with thirty or forty or fifty thousand keys. This queer, staring, soft little being in its mother's arms is organizing something within itself, beside which the most wonderful orchestra one can imagine ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... the meanwhile, let him dwell much among his fellow-craftsmen. They alone can take a serious interest in the childish tasks and pitiful successes of these years. They alone can behold with equanimity this fingering of the dumb keyboard, this polishing of empty sentences, this dull and literal painting of dull and insignificant subjects. Outsiders will spur him on. They will say, "Why do you not write a great book? paint a great picture?" If his guardian angel fail him, they may even persuade him to the ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... superb—nearly five hundred sweet-toned bells, and on of the best carillonneurs of Holland to play upon them. Hard work, though. They say the fellow often has to go to bed from positive exhaustion, after his performances. You see, the bells are attached to a kind of keyboard, something like they have on pianofortes; there is also a set of pedals for the feet; when a brisk tune is going on, the player looks like a kicking frog fastened to his seat ...
— Hans Brinker - or The Silver Skates • Mary Mapes Dodge
... assertion by seating himself at the keyboard and rattling off some popular melodies. With music and laughter the long twilight fled, for O'Neil's "boys" flung themselves into the task of entertaining his ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... welfare, joyfully sent her off, and the child spent several health-giving months in the country. To help her happily to occupy her time, the good friend bought Kate a cheap concertina. By the hour she would sit in the sunshine, mastering the keyboard, and soon she could play simple Army tunes. How richly our Heavenly Father blesses the gifts of love! All unconsciously, the good soldier was preparing the Angel Adjutant of the future to win the hopeless and despairing of ...
— The Angel Adjutant of "Twice Born Men" • Minnie L. Carpenter
... northern winter. Yet I was able to wring pure joy out of Rachmaninoff's playing at Carnegie Hall, with a great man making music for music's sake. I loved the beauty and balance and splendid sanity of that playing, without keyboard fire-works and dazzle and glare. But Rachmaninoff was the exception. Even Central Park seemed smaller than of old, and I couldn't remember which drives Dinky-Dunk and I had taken in the historic old hansom-cab after ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... closet and took from the top shelf an excessively ornamented accordion,—the opulent gift of a reckless admirer. It was so inordinately decorated, so gorgeous in the blaze of papier mache, mother-of-pearl, and tortoise-shell on keys and keyboard, and so ostentatiously radiant in the pink silk of its bellows that it seemed to overawe the plainly furnished room with its splendors. "You ought to keep it on the table in a glass vase, Phemie," said her ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... on receiving his take places it on the copy-holder of his linotype or monotype machine and begins composing it into type. The linotype machine consists of a keyboard not unlike that of the typewriter, which actuates a magazine containing matrices or countersunk letter molds, together with a casting mechanism for producing lines or bars of words. By touching the keys, the compositor releases letter by letter an entire line of matrices, which ...
— News Writing - The Gathering , Handling and Writing of News Stories • M. Lyle Spencer
... lawyer's mind were not giving away; and if so, to whom was he to turn at this eleventh hour? No man in the State knew the ins and outs of conventions as did Hilary Vane; and, in the rare times when there had been crises, he had sat quietly in the little room off the platform as at the keyboard of an organ, and the delegates had responded to his touch. Hilary Vane had named the presidents of conventions, and the committees, and by pulling out stops could get such resolutions as he wished—or as Mr. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... embroidery materials with which she had been working, and a lamp-shade half finished. A woman's magazine printed in a city four thousand miles away lay open at the fashion plates. There were other magazines, and many books, and open music above the white keyboard of the piano, and vases glowing red and yellow with wild-flowers and silver birch leaves. He could smell the faint perfume of the fireglow blossoms, red as blood. In a pool of sunlight on one of the big white bear rugs lay the sleeping cat. And then, at the far end of the cabin, ...
— The Flaming Forest • James Oliver Curwood
... the keys lightly and when he sang his voice seemed scarcely to carry across the room. There was a rapid passage on the keyboard, like the patter of a pony's hoofs in the distance, and then the ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... mobile nostrils of her delicate nose dilated with a nervous trembling that intensified the mocking smile betrayed by her curling lips. Her hands were resting upon her plump arms, and with a trembling motion of the fingers beat a feverish little march as if she were playing a scale on a keyboard. ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... mountains, and certain rocky eminences in the middle distance, but nothing of grandeur. Poplars marched along with us on either side, primly on guard, and puritanical, though all the while their myriad little fingers seemed to twinkle over the keyboard of an invisible piano, ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... the other, letting himself down on to the keyboard of the piano with a loud musical crash, and laughing heartily all the time. "Why don't you get on with your work? Anyone would think you were in training for a cat-gut scraper at a low theatre instead of for an ...
— The Queen's Scarlet - The Adventures and Misadventures of Sir Richard Frayne • George Manville Fenn
... pensive, Carli swung himself back to the keyboard again, pounding out a few bars of the dance music in Strauss' Salome, of which the score lay open before him. He was a good-looking young man of twenty-two, of whom any mother, not too exacting, might be proud. Very blond—with well-chiselled features ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... spirits that we would not have been surprised if he had danced a jig. He threw his long hair back from his forehead, as if to throw care to the winds. Later he spread his large hands over the keyboard in protest and said, "No more from me, but we must hear Schloezer before we go." Therefore Schloezer was obliged to play. He can only improvise, as you know. Liszt sat by his side ...
— The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912 • Lillie DeHegermann-Lindencrone
... of Italian harpsichords from the Hugo Worch Collection in the United States National Museum are described in detail and illustrated. Also, the author offers an explanation for certain puzzling variations in keyboard ranges and vibrating lengths of strings ...
— Italian Harpsichord-Building in the 16th and 17th Centuries • John D. Shortridge
... friends. The popular demand being for the mastery of technique, showy pieces are prepared whose mechanism so claims the attention that the principles underlying both technics and interpretation are neglected. Well-controlled hands, fingers, wrists and arms, with excellent manipulation of the keyboard, may be admired at the recital, but little of that effective playing is heard which finds its way to the hearer's heart. A dead monotony will too often recall the letter that killeth because devoid of ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... half-closed the better to see her work, or rolling, between her fingers, little bread-pellets. As to the piano, the more quickly her fingers glided over it the more he wondered. She struck the notes with aplomb, and ran from top to bottom of the keyboard without a break. Thus shaken up, the old instrument, whose strings buzzed, could be heard at the other end of the village when the window was open, and often the bailiff's clerk, passing along the highroad bare-headed and in list slippers, stopped to listen, his sheet of paper ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... stands guard at Euston. This high house contains many levers, standing in thick, shining ranks. It perfectly resembles an organ in some great church, if it were not that these rows of numbered and indexed handles typify something more acutely human than does a keyboard. It requires four men to play this organ-like thing, and the strains never cease. Night and day, day and night, these four men are walking to and fro, from this lever to that lever, and under their hands the great machine raises its endless hymn of a world ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... records of output of a typist who was using a different keyboard every day, if there were that many kinds of keyboards. It is easy for anyone to conceive the great advantages of standard keyboards for such machines, but only those who have made a study of output of all kinds of workers can fully realize that similar ...
— The Psychology of Management - The Function of the Mind in Determining, Teaching and - Installing Methods of Least Waste • L. M. Gilbreth
... the English girl. The performances of the Mozart festival were ended. Miss Gordon needed daily the spiritual uplift of music. She had a piano in her reception room, and a roll of opera scores which accompanied her on her travels. Jaime sat near, before the keyboard, trying to accompany the pieces she was interpreting, ever those of the same author, the god, the only! The hotel was near the station, and the noise of drays, carriages and street cars annoyed the English woman and she closed the ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... standard for so many computer margins), and the entire original edition we received in all caps was over 800,000 chars in length, including line enumeration, symbols for caps and the punctuation marks, etc., since they were not available keyboard characters at the time (probably the keyboards operated at baud rates of around 113, meaning the typists had to type slowly for the ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... to hold his mind. The shading of the lights, the patches of dark shadows, the vagueness of some parts, the sharp outlines of others, the quietness of some parts of the picture as against the vehement movement of others all play on the keyboard of our mind and secure the desired ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... aeeordeoni Ger. Handharmonica, Ziehharmonica), a small portable reed wind instrument with keyboard, the smallest representative of the organ family, invented in 1829 by ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Anthony called from the piano. "Listen here! I've found the lost chord." He bore down with his huge hands upon the yellow keyboard, bringing forth a metallic crash that blended fearfully with the bartender's voice. "It's a ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... speaker, the quickness with which she had grasped the situation and leveled her revolver, brought The Hopper to an abrupt halt in the middle of the room, where he fell with a discordant crash across the keyboard of a grand piano. He turned, cowering, to confront a tall, young woman in a long ulster who advanced toward him slowly, but with every mark of determination upon her face. The Hopper stared beyond the gun, held in a ...
— A Reversible Santa Claus • Meredith Nicholson
... on Claire in a series of blurred hectic pictures.... She knew that Stillman was leading her toward the piano, but the living-room and its toned lights gave her a curious sense of unreality. She seated herself before the white keyboard and folded her hands with desperate resignation while she waited for Stillman to ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... a sergeant plugged in certain stops upon a keyboard and then when the Colonel, taking a hand telephone up from a table, had talked into it in German he passed it ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... out and shut the door. Then he went straight up to the piano, seized Valentine's hands and dragged them from the keyboard. ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... last twenty years. At no time in musical history have there been such express-speed modifications of manner as those which divide, let us say, the latest piano pieces of Brahms (1893) and the latest of Scriabin (1914). It is possible, indeed, that our standard system of keyboard tuning may require modification in the not very distant future. Once again, as three hundred years ago, music seems to be in the throes of a new birth. On the former occasion, the process of convalescence lasted rather more than a century, from Monteverde through Carissimi and Schuetz and ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... years ago as a means of obtaining strictly comparable objective data concerning the problem-solving ability of various types and conditions of animals. The method was first tried with human subjects in the Psychopathic Hospital, Boston, with a crude keyboard apparatus which, however, proved wholly satisfactory as a means of demonstrating its value. It has since been applied by means of mechanisms especially adapted to the structure and activities of the organisms, to the study of the behavior of the crow, pig, rat, and ringdove ...
— The Mental Life of Monkeys and Apes - A Study of Ideational Behavior • Robert M. Yerkes
... poet. The first aimed at effect and posed as the Paganini of the piano; Chopin, on the other hand, seemed never to concern himself [se preuccuper] about the public, and to listen only to the inner voices. He was unequal; but when inspiration took hold of him [s'emparait de hit] he made the keyboard sing in an ineffable manner. I owe him some poetic hours ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks |
