Word: descant
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...African balladeer named Josef Marais has been quietly building a reputation as a specialist in folk and children's songs. He and his Dutch wife Miranda accompany themselves-playing a guitar, tom-toms and an occasional native instrument, he chanting in English and Afrikaans, she piping a shy descant. But in the past year Minstrel Marais has turned popular songsmith. His songs of the veld, such as Sugarbush, Ay-round the Corner and the fast-rising Ma Says, Pa Says, have been recorded by such big-league songbirds as Jo Stafford and Doris...
...clearly, Eliot saw and recorded the crumbling of European civilization; more & more sharply, his verse photographed the human ruins-an old man waiting for death in a rented house; a tuberculous courtesan calling for lights in decaying Venice; Apeneck Sweeney at an all-night party where, in a soaring descant above the all-erasing vulgarity, "The nightingales are singing near/The Convent of the Sacred Heart...