scratch cradle

The Lyris, the latest in a string of great L.A. quartets, filled every square inch of First Lutheran with rapturous sonorities in David Hertzberg’s “Méditation Boréale” and created wind turbulence in the raw scratching of strings in Thomas Kotcheff’s “Scratch Cradle.”

When four or five played, the string rapidly passed from hand to hand until, in the rapidity of the motion, one missed, who then stood out, and so on until only one was left, winning the game of cat's, catch, or scratch cradle.

In Sussex and Kent, when I was a boy, it was commonly played among children, but always called cat's, catch, or scratch cradle, and consisted generally of two or more players.

One wet day I got a piece of string to show them how to play "scratch cradle," and was quite astonished to find that they knew it better than I did and could make all sorts of new figures I had never seen.