"Pianissimo" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... all voice teachers can agree is that the upper voice is not properly trained until it has a perfect messa di voce that is, until the singer can swell the tone from the lightest pianissimo to full voice and return, on any tone in his compass, without a break and without sacrificing the pure singing quality. How shall this be accomplished? If the singer is forcing the upper voice it is safe to say in the beginning ...
— The Head Voice and Other Problems - Practical Talks on Singing • D. A. Clippinger
... remind her of a symphonic poem. The part by the landing-stage is in B minor, if I remember rightly, but lower down things get extremely mixed. There is a slodgy theme in several keys at once, meaning mud-banks, and another for the navigable canal, and the exit into the Baltic is in C sharp major, pianissimo." ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... phrases, to a fortissimo dominant chord; thence through a descending cadenza-like passage we are whirled back to the Recapitulation. In material and treatment this corresponds exactly to the Exposition and has the same pianissimo ending. Such an effect was a touch of genuine originality and was a delightful contrast to the conventional flourish of trumpets with which the Finale of the period was expected to end. Music is often most impressive when ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... soaring Souls' outpouring? When my Mimus Carolinensis, (That's his Latin name,) When my warbler wild commences Song's hilarious rhapsody, Just to please himself and me! Primo Cantante! Scherzo! Andante! Piano, pianissimo! Presto, prestissimo! Hark! are there nine birds or ninety and nine? And now a miraculous gurgling gushes Like nectar from Hebe's Olympian bottle, The laughter of tune from a rapturous throttle! Such melody must be a hermit-thrush's! ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... theatres. As she plays Don Juan, Zerlina comes tripping over the meadows, and Masetto after her, with a crowd of peasants and maidens: and they sing the sweetest of all music, and the heart beats with happiness, and kindness, and pleasure. Piano, pianissimo! the city is hushed. The towers of the great cathedral rise in the distance, its spires lighted by the broad moon. The statues in the moonlit place cast long shadows athwart the pavement: but the ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of horror. A screech-owl had just sent its dreadful note in melancholy waves out upon the still night air. It started low, almost pianissimo, rose with a hideous crescendo to fortissimo, and then died away like the wail of a lost soul. It came from just ahead of them and to the right. Alice's horse shied and danced nervously. Prudence's horse stood stock still. Then, as no further sound ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... food, I have set them to music in such a way that the meal, for instance, may open with a Soup Overture, to be followed by a Roast Beef March in C, and so on, closing with a kind of Mince Pie La Somnambula pianissimo in G. Space, of course, forbids an extended description of this idea as I propose to carry it out, but the conception is certainly grand. Let us picture the jaws of a whole family moving in exact time to a Strauss waltz on the silent remains of the late lamented ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... remember an occasion when all the musicians began to breathe at ease on my taking this piece at the true moderate pace: then the humorous sforzato of the basses and bassoons at once produced an intelligible effect; the short crescendi became clear, the delicate pianissimo close was effective, and the gentle gravity of the returning principal movement was properly felt. Now, the late Capellmeister Reissiger, of Dresden, once conducted this symphony there, and I happened to be present at the performance together with Mendelssohn; we talked ...
— On Conducting (Ueber das Dirigiren): - A Treatise on Style in the Execution of Classical Music • Richard Wagner (translated by Edward Dannreuther)
... into the studio, already comrades, and Michael had chiefly listened while the other two had violent and friendly discussions on every subject under the sun. Then Hermann happened to sit down at the piano, and played a Chopin etude pianissimo prestissimo with finger-tips that just made the notes to sound and no more, and Sylvia told him that he was getting it better; and then Sylvia sang "Who is Sylvia?" and Hermann told her that she shouldn't have eaten so much lunch, or shouldn't have sung; and then, by ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... representing his own style in Phoebus's aria, and promptly caricaturing it in the second part of Pan's ("Wenn der Ton zu muehsam klingt"). Midas votes for Pan—"denn nach meinen beiden Ohren singt er unvergleichlich schoen." At the word "Ohren" the violins give a pianissimo "hee-haw" which is fully as witty in its musical aptness as Mendelssohn's clown-theme in the Overture to the Midsummer Night's Dream; and in the ensuing dialogue their prophecy is verified. As with many other great artists, Bach's playfulness occasionally showed itself inconveniently where little ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... forcible, pathetically yearning and aspiring theme was the only comprehensible idea amid the swirl of enveloping sound. When the whole had been repeated, there was a sudden jump to a different theme in extreme pianissimo, accompanied by the swelling vibrations of the first violins, which was intended to represent a Fata Morgana. I had secured three pairs of trumpets in different keys, in order to produce this exquisite, gradually dawning and seductive theme with the ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner |
