"Unmusical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... bears, than any thing human. But though the hymn and psalm-tunes of the Brethren's Church are mostly of antient construction, and, though rich in harmony, have no airy melodies to make them easily understood by unmusical ears, yet the Esquimaux soon learn to sing them correctly; and the voices of the women are remarkably sweet and well-tuned. Brother Kohlmeister having given one of the children a toy-flute, Paul took it, and immediately picked out the proper stops in playing ...
— Journal of a Voyage from Okkak, on the Coast of Labrador, to Ungava Bay, Westward of Cape Chudleigh • Benjamin Kohlmeister and George Kmoch
... French Romanticists and rebels has long since been acknowledged a fact in select circles, both in France and Germany, and if we still have Wagner with us in England, if we still consider Nietzsche as a heretic, when he declares that "Wagner was a musician for unmusical people," it is only because we are more removed than we imagine, from all the great movements, intellectual and otherwise, which take place on ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... feeling is affected through the crude, unskilful, and absurd use of the pedal, especially of the soft pedal of which we are now speaking. This affectation only gives one more proof of our unhealthy, stupid, and unmusical infancy in piano performances. A good-natured public, drummed up and brought together by patient persuasion and by urgent recommendations, of which virtuosos can obtain an abundance (for the tormented cities which they have visited cannot otherwise get rid of them), ...
— Piano and Song - How to Teach, How to Learn, and How to Form a Judgment of - Musical Performances • Friedrich Wieck
... supposed to be unmusical; but without dwelling on the patronage extended to the organ-grinder, without seeking to found any argument on the prevalence of the jew's trump, there is surely one instrument that may be said to be national in the fullest ...
— The Wrong Box • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... into a cuspidor with long-range accuracy. He beamed with cheerful malevolence awhile upon his tormentors; then, uplifting a cracked falsetto in an unmusical wail, to the tune of "London Bridge is Falling ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... city lay bathed in a refreshing silence. It was very heavenly to stand there and feel the cool, soft air—unaccompanied, for the first time during the day, by the rattling rumbling sounds of locomotion and the jarring discordant murmurs of unmusical voices—fanning ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... times successively. These last are said to have a tone; the others are not allowed to have any. If we wish to give nonelastic bodies a tone, it will be necessary to make them continue their sound, by repeating our blows quickly upon them. This will effectually give them a tone; and an unmusical instrument has often by this means a fine effect in concerts. The effects of a drum depend upon this principle. Gold, silver, copper, and iron, which are elastic metals, are sonorous; but lead, which possesses scarcely any elasticity, produces little or no tone. Tin, which ...
— Popular Lectures on Zoonomia - Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and Disease • Thomas Garnett
... even in the Coriolanus. There are Lines that are utterly void of that celestial Fire of which Shakespear is sometimes Master in so great a Degree. And consequently there are Lines that are stiff and forc'd, and harsh and unmusical, tho' Shakespear had naturally an admirable Ear for the Numbers. But no Man ever was very musical who did not write with Fire, and no Man can always write with Fire, unless he is so far Master of his Time, as to expect those ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... the sweet jinglings of the Carrillion at Antwerp and in other Flemish cities. I have also heard the dulcet chimings of many village church bells in various parts of the land, and I have listened with undelight to the unmusical tones of Big Ben of Westminster, but so far as mellow tone is concerned, I rarely hear any ordinary church bells that are more dulcet and harmonious than the bells of ...
— A Tale of One City: The New Birmingham - Papers Reprinted from the "Midland Counties Herald" • Thomas Anderton
... "All the peasantry in Mallorca seem to know one tune and one only, in a minor key, with a compass of three whole tones. It is not unmusical, but, like the sereno's chant, it is hard to catch." As I happened to know the air, the least I could do was to dot it down in her note-book when she asked me to. The book flew open as she passed it across the deal table-top, and showed the name "Hortensia ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... grow by exercise. Mozart was so devoted and so enthusiastic in his fondness for his father and mother and his sister that his heart was graduated early for any demand. The most unmusical people know that Mozart stands unrivalled among infant prodigies, that he was a pocket-Paderewski, at a period when most children cannot even trundle a hoop, and that he was deep in composition before the usual child is out of kilts. Everybody has seen the ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... Diapason tone first found expression in this country by the introduction into our larger organs of what was called a Stentorphone. This was a large metal Diapason of ordinary construction, voiced on heavy wind pressure. It was most harsh, unmusical and inartistic. It produced comparatively little foundation tone and a powerful chord of harmonics, many of them dissonant. In Germany, Weigle, of Stuttgart, introduced a similar stop, but actually exaggerated its want of refinement by making the ...
— The Recent Revolution in Organ Building - Being an Account of Modern Developments • George Laing Miller
... all right—take Betty," and Walter emitted a most unmusical brawl. "Of course, you and Ed are keeping the contract. You are doing as you please. Behold Ed now, ...
— The Motor Girls Through New England - or, Held by the Gypsies • Margaret Penrose
... box the monarch had nodded graciously and from the silver bower the lady had smiled softly, so that the duke had no reason for dissatisfaction; the attitude of the crowd was of small moment, an unmusical accompaniment to the potent pantomime, of which the principal figures were Francis, the King Arthur of Europe, and the princess, ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... poor—or no— ear for poetry, since the only definition of "harsh" in his Dictionary which is applicable here is "rough to the ear." As no specific lines from the poem are labelled "harsh," one is forced to conclude that the whole poem is unmusical to Johnson's ears—if "harsh" means only "rough to the ear." But the notes to Shakespeare make it perfectly clear that "harsh" often means something other than that. Sometimes a line is stigmatised as "harsh" because it contains what Johnson ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... on the shore. The woods reechoed with the return of their exiled tenants. A hundred tribes, as gaily dressed as any burnished natives of the south, greeted our eyes in our accustomed walks, and their voices, though unmusical, were the sweetest that ...
— The Journey to the Polar Sea • John Franklin |
