"Minor key" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in each canoe singing a plaintive chant in minor key, accompanied by heavy strokes of the paddle handles against the sides of the canoe, as if to keep time. There were some fine voices to be heard, and though there were but slight variations in the sounds or words, the Indians seemed never to tire in repeating, ...
— Ox-Team Days on the Oregon Trail • Ezra Meeker
... were thoroughly religious in their tone, however quaint then: expression, and were in a minor key, both as to words and music. The attitude is always the same, and, as a commentary on the life of the race, is infinitely pathetic. Nothing but patience for this life,—nothing but triumph in the next. Sometimes the present ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... have, with the earliest literature of the race which was to be the main instrument of Celtic bad karma in historical times—the Teutons. Here, as usual, common impressions are false. It is the latter, the Teutonic, that is in the minor key, and full of wistful sadness. There is an earnestness about it: a recognition of, and rather mournful acquiescence in, the mightiness of Fate, which is imagined almost always adverse. I quote these lines from ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... her. And this resulted in an atmosphere of seriousness and responsibility which inevitably reacted on the boy, making him sober beyond his years, tempering his natural vivacity with watchfulness, and pitching even his laughter in a minor key. ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... was weedy, his beard was long, And weedy and long was he, And I heard this wight on the shore recite, In a singular minor key: ...
— Fifty Bab Ballads • William S. Gilbert
... us are mighty bad and some are wounded slight, And some will see their threescore years and some won't last the night, But the Red Cross train takes up the strain all in a minor key And sings Boulogne and Blighty as she rumbles ...
— "Crumps", The Plain Story of a Canadian Who Went • Louis Keene
... bravely from the flagstaff, as if bidding defiance to the whole hill-country and all its swarthy tribes, hung down and clung and wrapped itself about the flagstaff, the halyard singing a dolefully weird strain in a minor key, while the wind whistled by it on its ...
— Fix Bay'nets - The Regiment in the Hills • George Manville Fenn
... contrast to this is the "Valse," Op. 34, No. 2. This is in a minor key and instead of representing the abandon of the dance, it seems rather to depict a melancholy lover allowing his eyes to travel slowly around the ballroom in a futile search of his heart's desire. The prevailing tone of the composition rather is that of an elegy—the burial of fond hopes. ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... counsel in this matter is—Be sure that you use the joys which God does give. Many good people seem to think that it is somehow devout and becoming to pitch most of their songs in a minor key, and to be habitually talking about trials and disappointments, and 'a desert land,' and 'Brief life is here our portion,' and so on, and so on. There are two ways in which you can look at the world and at everything that befalls you. There is enough in everybody's ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... part of the whole entertainment; and if they don't so see him, they are disappointed. Why was Mr. GRUNDY's happy translation of Les Oiseaux peculiarly successful? because it was a light, fresh, and pretty piece, wherein the occasional phrase in a minor key was so artistically introduced as to be a relish to our enjoyment of the humour of the characters and of the situations; but all this would have gone for comparatively little had it not been for the excellence of Mr. HARE's rendering of the first-rate ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, March 21, 1891 • Various
... constitute themselves the pessimists of the world, while the old ones, who know what real trouble is, are left to do the optimism by themselves. If you are bound to sing, sing cheerfully! Try to forget that 'sad' rhymes with 'glad,' and don't feel it necessary to end in the minor key. That rhyming business has a lot to answer for. I like you best when you are content to be ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... knowing what I played, but merely absorbed in trying to give utterance to the sounds which were falling softly upon my inner sense of hearing like drops of summer rain on a thirsty soil. I was just aware that I was threading the labyrinth of a minor key, and that the result was a network of delicate and tender melody reminding ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... harm had happened to her yet. The sound grew and grew, and came nearer and nearer. But although it was song, she could distinguish no vowel-melody in it, nothing but a tone-melody, a crooning, as it were, ever upon one vowel in a minor key. It came quite near at length, and yet even then had something of the far away sound left in it. It was like the wind of a summer night inside a great church bell in a deserted tower. It came close, and ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... time the music changed, and ran into a plaintive strain, in a minor key. Then it was that all the former witchery of her voice came over me; then it was that she seemed to sing from the heart and to the heart. Her fingers moved about the chords as if they scarcely touched them. Her whole manner and appearance changed; her eyes beamed with the ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... the loveliest mittens with it you can imagine. These the Crabs, having resumed and screwed on their claws, placed cheerfully upon their wrists, and walked away rapidly on their hind-legs, warbling songs with a silvery voice and in a minor key. ...
— Nonsense Books • Edward Lear
... the subject is one in itself almost incapable of color, and although, in order to increase the wildness of the impression, all brilliant local color has been refused even where it might easily have been introduced, as in the figures; yet in the low minor key which has been chosen, the melodies of color have been elaborated to the utmost possible pitch, so as to become a leading, instead of a subordinate, element in the composition; the subdued warm hues of the granite promontories, the dull stone color of the walls of the buildings, clearly opposed, ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... degenerates into mockery, and liberty into license: nature is never put to shame, and will commonly bear much more. Especially to the American sense did their humorous and comic strokes, their negro-minstrelsy and attempts at Yankee comedy, seem in a minor key. There was not enough irreverence and slang and coarse ribaldry, in the whole evening's entertainment, to have seasoned one line of some of our most popular comic poetry. But the music, and the gymnastic, acrobatic, and other feats, were of a very high order. And I will say here that the characteristic ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... see her at home," interjected Mueller, in a minor key of disdain. "There she looks worse than a slovenly servant girl. And she doesn't seem to find time to patch up her dirty gown, while her boy, the only child she has, runs about the streets like a cobbler's apprentice from the lower town. One thing, though, that urchin does know—he ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... did not seek to found a kingdom, nor to revolutionize society, nor did he force upon the world his pattypan rhymes about linnets, and larks, and daffodils. Far from it: he was very modest—diffident, in fact—and his song was quite in the minor key, but still the chain-shot and bombs of literary warfare were ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... aged Christians struck up a sweet Wesleyan melody; and that, too, was in the same soft minor key that Fred had heard singing through the gas-burner. They finished the little hymn, and the woman scraped some corn from a cob into the corn-popper. In a few minutes, she had filled a large bowl with ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... may be idealized, and figure as a higher form of sensibility. Their spirit was still too essentially masculine for pessimism to be elaborated or lengthily dwelt on in their classic literature. They would have despised a life set wholly in a minor key, and summoned it to keep within the proper bounds of lachrymosity. The discovery that the enduring emphasis, so far as this world goes, may be laid on its pain and failure, was reserved for races more complex, and (so to speak) ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... hair was matted, his face was black, And matted and black was he; And I heard this wight in the vault recite, "In a singular minor key": ...
— A line-o'-verse or two • Bert Leston Taylor
... a fantastic baroque desert. Venus was a riot of colors, all in a minor key: muted greens and reds, an overbearing gray, a strange, ghostly blue. The sky, or rather the cloud layer, dominated the atmosphere with its weird pinkness. It was a silent ...
— Starman's Quest • Robert Silverberg
... of the ass has made her as famous in war as in literature. She is a marked feature everywhere in military stations, alike in the camp and the field, and her bray always in the minor key, gives a touch of pathos to the music of the band! The ass accompanied Deborah and Barak when they went to fight their great battle, she has gone with pioneers in all their weary wanderings, and has taken an active part in the commerce of the world, bearing the heaviest burdens ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... a story in blank verse descriptive of this passage of the soul. It is sometimes sung in very dramatic fashion, the performer acting the principal incidents and pitching his voice in a doleful, though musical, minor key. Such a recitation of the passage of the soul, delivered by a wild and tragic figure before an intently listening group of squatting men and women illuminated by flickering torchlight, is by no means unimpressive to the European observer. The following lines are a rough ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... I mind me, now that she is dead, When nothing warned us of the dark decree, I crooned, to lull her, in a minor key, Such fancies as first came into my head. I crooned them low, beside her little bed; And the refrain was somehow "Come with me, And we will wander by the purple sea;" I crooned it, and—God help me!—felt no dread. O Purple Sea, beyond the stress ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... unalloyed, unqualified lark quite to the end of the second cup of tea, when it seemed to undergo a slight clouding over—a something we should rather indicate by saying that it slowed down passing through a station, than that it was modulated into a minor key. Of course, we are handicapped in our metaphors by an imperfect understanding of the exact force of the word ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... elusive quality of Chopin's theme. This is cruelly pedantic. The prelude arrests one in ecstasy; the fixed period of contemplation of the saint or the hypnotized sets in, and the awakening is almost painful. Chopin, adopting the relative minor key as a pendant to the picture in B flat, thrills the nerves by a bold dissonance in the next prelude, No. 22. Again, concise paragraphs filled with the smoke of revolt and conflict The impetuosity of this largely moulded piece in G minor, its ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... be greatly carried away by music, which had upon them quite an intoxicating effect. There were certain high notes and chords in a minor key which had a great attraction for them, and which constantly recurred in their melodies and their lengthy ululations. Some of the notes had undoubtedly been suggested by the song of local birds and by sounds of wild animals. The Bororos were good imitators of sounds, ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... into the minor key again, I thought. Listen!—"Mr. S. died last night. You must be here to-morrow, if possible, at the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... of good fortune for the colony. Of the American military leaders, Generals Howe, Dearborn and Wadsworth were all examples of a common standard; even Sir George Prevost, the new Governor-General of Canada and Commander-in-Chief, was tuned in a minor key. ...
— The Story of Isaac Brock - Hero, Defender and Saviour of Upper Canada, 1812 • Walter R. Nursey
... he unchained the pump-handle. Now for the next two hours the strident cries of the exasperated pump, and the screaming gabble of many tongues, all refreshed by slumber and eager for exercise, made such a diabolic tumult and discord as to throw even the braying of the donkeys into the minor key. Of course, sleep under such circumstances would have been miraculous; but, then, no one had any right to sleep when the rocks were breaking again into flame, and the mists which filled the gorge by night were folding up their tents. I therefore ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... no more the minor key, No more the songs of exile long and lone; Thy tears henceforth be tears of memory. Sing, with the joy the joyless would have known Who for this visioned happiness so gladly ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke
... Maggie went to the writing-table, and all knew what it meant. Mr. Brookes occasionally lamented in a minor key, but without having recourse to his handkerchief. Willy said nothing; his losses on the Stock Exchange had been heavy; and owing to a conversation Frank had drawn him into during dinner the other day, his digestion, ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... road Bishun Singh—tolerant of his Sahib's vagaries—was still chatting with the potter; a blare of discord in a minor key announced an approaching procession; and there, in talk with the bangle-seller, stood the cause of these strange doings; keeping a curious eye on the mad Englishman, but otherwise frankly unconcerned. Again ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... little of music to tell what relation the recurrent cadences of those songs and their broken rhythms may bear to the antique modes. But I can listen, as long as musicians will perform, to those infinite repetitions, that insistent sounding of the minor key. It pleases me to fancy there a music come from far away—from unknown river gorges, from camp-fires glimmering on great plains. Does not such darkness breathe through it, such melancholy, such haunting of elusive airs? There are flashes too of light, of song, the playing ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... the creation, at this coming of Jesus, at the coming crowning of Jesus in John's Revelation. Below, the only music was that of the babe's holy young mother, God's chosen one to mother His Son, crooning to her babe; and the gentle lowing in minor key of the oxen whose stall He shared. Above, the great glory shining, the messenger of God speaking a message of peace and love. Below, only ...
— Quiet Talks about Jesus • S. D. Gordon
... for. He was a tall, gaunt, sallow man of about thirty, with small gray eyes, a fine, falsetto voice, pitched in the minor key, and his speech the rude dialect of the mountains. His face had as many expressions as could be found in a regiment, and he seemed a strange combination of cunning, simplicity, undaunted courage, and undoubting ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... upon his head, and pretend that he hadn't had a meal—of kisses—for a whole week; and occasionally he would come blowing out his cheeks like a king's trumpeter, to announce that Mike Laflin might be at any moment expected. But for the most part these impersonations were in a minor key, as Mike had soon discovered that the more pathetic he was, the more he was hugged and called a "weenty," which was one of his own sad little names ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... to surge upwards in a flowing tide of sound, the mass of the piano-part, multiform, coherent, level, and breaking everywhere in melody like the deep blue tumult of the sea, silvered and charmed into a minor key by the moonlight. But at a given moment, without being able to distinguish any clear outline, or to give a name to what was pleasing him, suddenly enraptured, he had tried to collect, to treasure in his memory the phrase or harmony—he knew not which—that had just been ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... other folk-songs, certain shanties—originally, no doubt, in a mode—were, by the insertion of leading notes, converted into the minor key. There was also the tendency on the part of the modern sailor to turn his minor key into a major one. I sometimes find sailors singing in the major, nowadays, tunes which the very old men of my boyhood used to sing in the minor. A case in point is 'Haul ...
— The Shanty Book, Part I, Sailor Shanties • Richard Runciman Terry
... a time favorable to thought and meditation. I have a liking for such days as these; they revive one's converse with one's self and make it possible to live the inner life; they are quiet and peaceful, like a song in a minor key. We are nothing but thought, but we feel our life to its very center. Our very sensations turn to reverie. It is a strange state of mind; it is like those silences in worship which are not the empty moments of devotion, but the full moments, and which are so because ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... cattle trail— Through valleys still and silent even now, Save when the yellow-breasted desert lark Cries shrill and lonely from a dead mesquite, In quivering notes set in a minor key; The endless round of sunny days, of starry nights, The desert's blank immutability. The coyote's howl is heard at dark from some Low-lying hill; companioned by the loafer wolf They yelp in concert to the far off stars, Or gnaw the bleached bones in savage rage That lie unburied ...
— Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp • Various
... effort to rise from the dreamy apathy in which Eastern imagination delights; but it is immediately followed by the fall of the rhythmus, re-establishing its languid repose. The frequent use of half notes induces a predominance of the minor key, and this, with the constant recurrence of the rhythmical fall, imparts to Semitic and Hindoo music that melancholy, lethargic uniformity which expresses in a striking manner the benumbed energies and undeveloped spirit of the people among ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... the minor key, the voice of the singer thrilled to the very nerves, every word came distinctly ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various |
