Word: counterpoints
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...drought, flooded a valley, threatened the city of Sacramento; endangered an airplane, stalled a crack train. Before it died it gave birth to another storm which, in its ripeness, did spectacular work in New York City. In its birth, its life, its reproduction, its death, it worked in intimate counterpoint with the shapes and shifts of air upon the whole surface of the planet...
...could see, it capitalized on every music sure-fire ever invented: catchy, inclusive rhythms, abrupt changes in tempo, wild polytonality, a string technique which graded off from whole pages of unbearably shrill violin-chatter at some times to a Brahmsian luxuriance at others; to boot, reams of discordant counterpoint and impressively dull masses of sound. The quartet was musical sleight-of-hand personified, and it oozed cleverness. But it didn't ring true. Its themes bickered away in endless mediocrity, in a ceaseless spewing forth of notes and more notes--the whole thing suggestive of some mediaeval theologian spinning...
Harvard's yell-coaxers committed a serious sin against the First Commandment of pious and right-living cheer leaders. The boys simply weren't together. Counterpoint is fine in a Beethoven concerto, and uneven entrance and exit of voices the distinguishing characteristic of a Bach fugue. But the well-ordered cheer is strict harmony; and the cheering section will never be harmonious until the leaders all move the same way at the same time. Individualism has no place in cheer-leading--it has to be done as Hitler would have...
...Netherlands, while Hitler's troops were staging their invasion. Last week Columbia Broadcasting System broadcast his Cortege over WABC, and U. S. critics, who had not been hearing much Milhaud lately, found that Darius Milhaud could still turn a phrase of hard-bitten counterpoint as expertly as any of his contemporaries. A massive, close-knit dead march, the Cortege Funebre was imposingly militant rather than sad, made The Netherlands' fall ring with the relentless finality of doom...
Handel could incarnate his own unflagging vitality, his breadth of feeling wide as the open skies, his elemental strength, into the singers themselves, making them sing in sweeping comprehensive melodies and in intense close lines that make counterpoint quiver with life. Yet he had a perfect understanding of the capabilities and incapabilities of the singers, and never wrote beyond their capacities, so that the music never is unnatural or strained, as Beethoven so often is. Mozart, on the other hand, lacks Handel's great strength, though his delicate melodic line cannot be challenged...