Word: chord
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Virgil Thomson's music strives to recreate the atmosphere of the period by the use of simple melodies and simpler harmony. The motifs are often built on a single chord, suggesting bugle calls, and this lack of pretension adds charm to the score. Taken seriously, the music becomes tiring in its succession of tonic and dominant chords. The lack of variety, however, is atoned for by the music's good humor, clear orchestration, and subservience to the text...
Student of High Life. Rubinstein was born in Lodz, Poland, the youngest of seven children of a small manufacturer. By the time he was three, he was a "terrible little fiend" about music, screaming at his sisters when they struck a sour chord and banging the piano lid on their fingers to make them stop. Impressed with his son's possibilities, Papa Rubinstein bought him a child-sized violin. Artur promptly smashed it. Papa bought another, and Artur smashed that too. Papa gave up, let him concentrate on the then less fashionable piano...
...over the dancer's role for himself, shrugging one shoulder grotesquely to the syncopated piano rhythm, splaying the fingers of his left hand to the spastic tempos. The music got more conventional in texture as it got noisier, but ultimately, sheer noise was sufficient: as the last, clubbing chord thundered out, the Philharmonic's subscribers gasped, and then burst into applause...
Genial Generalities. The reception in Calcutta provided the final crashing chord to a barnstorming tour which had succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of any campaigning vote-seeker. But while Moscow's good-will ambassadors swelled with complacency at the air of universal approval surrounding them, their Indian hosts had begun to entertain some sober second thoughts. Bursting with genial, jocular generalities all along the line of march, the fun-loving Red Rover Boys had progressively proved more and more forgetful of the fact that Nehru's India still hugs a determined neutralism close to its heart...
...concerted attack or a distinguishable pulse. The percussionists made sense only because many of their rat-a-tats and grumblings came out as minute variations on themes. The winds, on the other hand, were so overpowering, so agonizingly taut, that the listener felt lucky to find a recurring chord to hang...