Nimble Fingers 1931

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Description

Full titles read: "Nimble fingers. Introducing Wilfred Worden (age 14) whose mastery of the piano is evidenced in his rendering of a Chopin Waltz."

London (probably Pathe Studio).

High angle M/S looking down onto Wilfred Worden as he plays the Chopin Waltz on a grand piano. Various...

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Data

Cataloguer:
Sarah
Stock:
Black & White
Sound:
Sound
Media URN:
37037
Sort Number:
PT 078
Time in/Out:
01:02:05:00 / 01:03:26:00
Canister:
PT 078
Film ID:
1040.02
Issue Date:
21/09/1931

Comments (2)

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  • Wilfred Worden was a teacher of Music in the private Benedictine Abbey School in Fort Augustus in the middle of the Great Glen, in the nineteen fifties. He taught piano to both my brother and sister for a spell (unsuccessfully) and the main impression he left with them was of a rather impatient and carnaptious mentor. He was small in stature with back-swept thick hair. He is just recognisable in the clip of him playing Mozart as a 14-year-old. I have memories of brief visits to his room in the Lodge at the end of the driveway leading up to the large Abbey building, when he showed me his latest designs of loudspeakers for his record-playing equipment. He had some of them fitted into sheets of plywood set into what looked like earthenware pipes on the floor. This was to increase the resonance. He also had designed a new arm for record players. His theory was that the conventional arm with the needle at the end making contact with the groove on the record, changed its angle of cont

    Brian Denoon 14th May 2013
  • contact as the arm moved toward the centre of the record. He devised an articulated form of arm that had the angle of the needle remain constant, thus ensuring a better tone of reproduction. Local legend had it that the idea was so revolutionary in those days that it was bought up by the major manufacturers and suppressed. As I said , local legend!

    He was a regular visitor at my parents’ home in the schoolhouse in Fort Augustus and they on one occasion visited his home in London. Details of a highly eccentric background linger.

    Brian Denoon 14th May 2013

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