"Semitone" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... forgo or take for granted. I had, having coming thus far on my homeward way, already more than half a mind to pursue it, when the band started to render the 'Merry Duchess' waltz, with reed instruments a semitone below the brass. This decided me, and I reached my door as ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... when singing with the men, are pitched an octave higher than theirs. They have most of them so far good ears, that, in whatever key a song is commenced by one of them, the rest will always join in perfect unison. After singing for ten minutes, the key had usually fallen a full semitone. Only two of them, of whom Iligliuk was one, could catch the tune as pitched by an instrument, which made it difficult with most of them to complete the writing of the notes; for if they once left off they were sure to recommence in some ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... on the other hand, is rarely heard, and, though having a piercing whinny which passes through every semitone of the scale, ...
— The Strand Magazine: Volume VII, Issue 37. January, 1894. - An Illustrated Monthly • Edited by George Newnes
... Lohengrin, Salome, Pan, Perseus enchant, their plastic yet metallic prose denotes the unique artist; above all they are modern, they graze the hem of the contemporaneous. From the sublime to the arabesque is but a semitone in his antic mind. Undulating in his desire to escape the automatic, doubting even his own scepticism, Jules Laforgue is a Hamlet a rebours. Old ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... Haydn did not conceive of the three movements of the sonata as constituting a single whole, because if he had he could not have followed a close in E-flat major with an opening in E major, exactly a semitone higher, without the slightest modulation. This proceeding is inexplicable to me, if he expected the sonata to be played through entire at a single hearing. The slow movement, however, is a very strong one, the subject full of musical ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews
... motive of all, the one which pervades the drama from beginning to end, is the love-motive. Its fundamental form is that in which it appears in the second bar of the Prelude in the oboe (No. 1).[35] Variants of it occur without the characteristic semitone suspension (1a) or with a falling seventh (1b). The cello motive of the opening phrase of the Prelude may also be considered as derived from the ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight |
