Word: descant
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...surprising that a man of Gingrich's ambitions would be drawn to the grandeur of worship at the basilica. Incense hangs in the air as the choir's descant reverberates off the highly polished walls of the Greek-style interior. "Isn't it just beautiful?" Gingrich asks. "That's part of what happened to me." (Her husband, Callista says, is an enthusiastic but limited singer: "He makes a joyful noise...
...Broken down, the Mississippi vote had an unmistakable racial descant - and unmistakable limits for Obama. Exit polls revealed once again an emerging racial divide that has opened in the Democratic party between whites who tend by healthy margins to favor Clinton and blacks who overwhelmingly favor Obama. African Americans made up nearly half of the Democratic vote in Mississippi - and 90% of those voters, according to exit polls, pulled the lever for Obama, his strongest showing yet among African Americans. But Obama did poorly among whites, winning only 30%, according to exit polls. While this split was visible in Alabama...
...service, four years ago, with the choir singing the final verse of ‘Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,’” Wilson writes in an e-mail. “The organ amplified the sheer emotional intensity of the moment and the beautiful, soaring descant made me realize that this moment would be how I remembered my freshman year….The Carol Services are a quintessential Harvard musical and emotional experience...
...extent that was true. This was not the first time that Rumsfeld had asked if the government needed to remake itself against a new enemy. But Rumsfeld's memo--for an Administration that had been touting its achievements overseas relentlessly for months--read like a grim descant of doubt at odds with the more optimistic line peddled almost daily to the public. A Bush aide searched for a silver lining: "If we were smart, we would take advantage of this to concede the obvious and talk about how we're trying to solve the problem...
...impact of steel meeting solid, razor-sharp ice. Then the music emerges as if from a watery grave, half heard and half perceived, a stately, contemplative hymn solemnly intoned by a string sextet. A brass choir picks up fragments of the tune, while a boys' chorus adds a heavenly descant of Kyrie Eleison. From time to time, scraps of sound emerge from the wreckage-buckling bulkheads, rushing water, disembodied voices of the survivors, alarm horns honking futilely across the cold North Atlantic-but as the great ship settles beneath the waves, the music continues in its calm, imperturbable course...