Word: counterpoints
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...homes. In the '80s, not only the dead are ) victims: "Was this what murder did to the innocent?" wonders a bystander. "Took away the people they loved, loaded their minds with terror, left them bereft and unfriended under a smouldering sky." Dalgliesh's assistant, Inspector Kate Miskin, provides a counterpoint to the Tory values exemplified by most of the characters on both sides of the law. Miskin has risen from a council-flat childhood to an imitation of chic affluence. A visitor to her sterile, modern apartment notes it is in "dull, orthodox, ghastly, conventional good taste." Like a Renaissance...
...title song, Simon says, is not about Elvis Presley or his Memphis home but about a "state of peace." Simon's double edge is at his keenest here, using a country boy's dream mansion, which turned into a mausoleum, as an ironic counterpoint to Homeless, sung a cappella with South African Gospel Group Ladysmith Black Mambazo. The rhythms washing over Graceland are infectious and inflective enough to shame rap silly, from the lovely, funky arc of Diamonds On the Soles of Her Shoes to the spooky snap of The Boy in the Bubble. African musicians appear on nine...
Gould's Wagner transcriptions (recorded in 1973), taken from the operas Die Meistersinger and Gotterdammerung, make for fun listening. Gould has added lots of counterpoint to the original orchestral score (in order to play all voices in the Meistersinger Prelude, Gould had to dub one take over another). In Gould's able hands Sibelius's sonatinas (recorded in 1976-7), short, sparsely-written works, receive as good a performance as they are likely ever to have on records...
...destinies of the two states sometimes worked in counterpoint, almost seemed to leapfrog each other. In the 1970s, for example, Massachusetts appeared to be threadbare and obsolete, a ghost town of the Industrial Revolution, its people shivering through the winters of the oil shortage. Texas boomed with energy--the kind it pumped out of the Permian Basin and the kind that came from its adrenal glands. Now it is Texas that is chastened and Massachusetts that seems, for the moment, to belong to the future. Two reports...
Kennedy's call brought out the dreamers, the tinkerers, the organizers, the suppliers. Lyndon Johnson never tired of telling the story of how Americans had found Teflon "for your old fryin' pan" on the way to the moon. But there was heavy counterpoint to this melody of invention. Nikita Khrushchev raged at Kennedy in Vienna in 1961. The Berlin Wall went up. The Soviets tested their huge hydrogen bomb, the one U.S. scientists had said they would not have for years...