"Counterpoint" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... gallery gods with delicious meshes of sound, so in prose-writing there must be scales run, fingerings worked out, and harmonies mastered. For in a page of lo bello stile you will find trills and arpeggios, turns, grace notes, a main theme, a sub theme, thorough-bass, counterpoint, ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... the mammalia are filled up, and their coverings have become more simple. Man possesses the most perfect osseous structure, the least and most insignificant covering. The whole force of organic power has attained an inward and centripetal direction. He has the whole world in counterpoint to him, but he contains an entire world within himself. Now, for the first time at the apex of the living pyramid, it is Man and Nature, but Man himself is a syllepsis, a compendium of Nature—the Microcosm! Naked and helpless cometh man ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... only with a minimum of L300 a year. The religious sense and the musical are in many points alike. If you wish to develop an initially melodious soul, it means expense: you must go to professors, study counterpoint, practice many hours daily, and attend concerts of the most exclusive and expensive kind. Similarly with religion in its finest flower. You need slaves to cook and wash for you if you mean to ecstaticise and see ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... and started a side dance, and was soon wiggling her hips convulsively; the singer commenced to gargarize softly; at intervals he would be silent and then nothing would be heard save the snapping of Tarugo's fingers and the clatter of her heels, which played the counterpoint. ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... study of harmony, and sings his pretty song to his simple accompaniment with so sweet and true a natural voice that we are charmed. It is the magic of nature, whereas Keene is a very Sebastian Bach in his counterpoint. There is nothing of the amateur about him; his knowledge of harmony in black and white is complete and thorough; mere consummate scoring has become to him a second nature; each separate note of his voice reveals ...
— Social Pictorial Satire • George du Maurier
... and Irish in Trinity Term, 1892, and took his B. A. degree (second class) in December, 1892. While at Trinity he studied music at the Royal Irish Academy of Music, where he won a scholarship in Harmony and Counterpoint. ...
— John M. Synge: A Few Personal Recollections, with Biographical Notes • John Masefield
... her love when you are gone, my liege, Witness these papers, there will not be wanting Those that will urge her injury—should her love— And I have known such women more than one— Veer to the counterpoint, and jealousy Hath in it an alchemic force to fuse Almost into one metal love and hate,— And she impress her wrongs upon her Council, And these again upon her Parliament— We are not loved here, and would be then perhaps Not so well ...
— Queen Mary and Harold • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... was any truth or not in the report that he had been playing a ramshackle piano in an East Side restaurant in New York when the Colonel picked him up, Sebastian could do charming things with quite simple little tunes, if you did not inquire into problems of harmony and counterpoint too closely. He was doing them now, weaving odds and ends of familiar tunes, rather scapegrace and thin, into a lovely, reassuring whole, that made you feel rested and safe. Judith, making herself comfortable against a stiff and unwieldy Arts and Crafts sort of cushion, ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton
... ago as 1828, the American public was told by Philip Trajetta,[A] that 'if counterpoint be not a science, neither is astronomy.' For want of proper expounders, this truth has made but little impression, and, while the Art of Music has advanced considerably among us, the Science has remained nearly stationary. In Europe, erudition, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... whipped away by the wind. Almost an hour passed before the sacred powers were ready to move, and they announced their willingness to proceed by screaming and blowing their white breath up in the air. Four of the slaves screamed counterpoint and fainted, while the rest looked as if they would be happier off dead. Jason had had some experience with primitive machines before so the safety valve on the boiler came as no great surprise. He was also prepared when the vehicle shuddered and began to move ...
— The Ethical Engineer • Henry Maxwell Dempsey
... autumn, on Favognana. Levanzo being north of Favognana this meant that, in both cases, they choose for their resting-place the second island they come to. There is no mistake about this being what I read, for I made a memoria technica about it at the time out of what Rockstro, my old counterpoint master, used to say musicians do in performing the diatonic major scale unaccompanied. In ascending they pass over the grave supertonic and take the acute supertonic, and in descending they pass over the acute supertonic and take the grave supertonic; ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones
... diploma. She now wishes to teach. What are the chief problems which she will have to face? She must first of all make up her mind whether she wishes to confine her work to the teaching of a solo instrument, together with some work in harmony or counterpoint, along orthodox lines, or whether she wishes to be in touch with modern methods of guiding the general musical education of children, as taken in some schools in the morning curriculum. If the latter, she must enter on a course ...
— Music As A Language - Lectures to Music Students • Ethel Home
... believes that the reformatory movement of the Florentines was the outcome of dissatisfaction with musical conditions brought about as much by indulgence of the appetite for the purely sensuous elements in music as by blind adherence to the restrictive laws of ecclesiastic counterpoint. ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson
... all for a minute or two as the south-west wind went past his ears, and played a strange tune on the innumerable stems of the bents and the hard-stalked blossoms, to which the bees sang counterpoint. Then the heart arose within him, and he drew the sword from the scabbard, and waved it about his head, and shook it toward the south, and cried out, "Now, welcome world, and be thou blessed from one end to the other, from the ocean ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris
... the Allegro scherzando, page 25. Possibly this would have gained somewhat by more combination and development, either of the principal subject or of some secondary subject; for instance, a little anodyne counterpoint, it seems to me, would not be out of place on pages 26, 27. etc., etc., and so on. Item for pages 50 to 54, in which the simple breadth of the period with the holding on of the accompaniment chords leaves rather a void; I should like there to be some incidence ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End" • Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated
... the care of a richer and fuller development. Metastasio is musical throughout; but, to follow up the simile, we may observe, that of poetical music, melody is the only part that he possesses, being deficient in harmonious compass, and in the mysterious effects of counterpoint. Or, to express myself in different terms, he is musical, but in no respect picturesque. His melodies are light and pleasant, but they are constantly repeated with little or no variation: when we have read a few of his pieces, we know them ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel |
