Word: diminuendo
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...syncopation. She gives the final words in the phrase their full traditional value. When she reaches the last couplet - "Until you will, how still my heart,/ How high the moon" - she extends the "high" into a sighing "hiiiiigh," then softens "the moon" into almost a whisper of regret. The diminuendo is a subtle reminder that, for all its drive and bounce, this is a song of longing. Until the lover returns, the moon is just a distant prop for melancholy...
Keillor always starts out his radio monologue by apologizing: "Well, it's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, my hometown." He always ends on a diminuendo, with the formula "That's the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong and all the men are good-looking and all the children are above average." In between, for 20 minutes or so, he discourses wonderingly, without notes, on a place where a dog lying asleep in the middle of Main Street will live out his days. In eleven years of talking about Lake Wobegon on A Prairie Home...
...Michael hears an old song on his car radio. "He liked the way the singer kept her voice so plain and ordinary," Tyler tells us, "too intent on expressing her sadness to concern herself with effect." That's the tone Tyler is generally after herself: limpid, understated, diminuendo. But the distance from there to becalmed isn't far. And this time she goes the distance...
Whereas the tendency in Schumann might be to exaggerate every rapid diminuendo and surprising modulation, the trio handled unexpected turns of phrase with elegant subtlety. Besides maintaining a sweet, round tone throughout the tumultuous first movement, violinist Hope reined in his exuberance so as not to drown out the lesser tunes allotted to the cello, played with gusto by Antonio Meneses. Meanwhile, Pressler, a shrunken old man seemingly twice the age of his fellow players, continually reared his head from side to side to check on the progress of the strings, despite the fact that neither violinist nor cellist seemed...
...Broadway theater, the new millennium has started on a note of musical diminuendo. With the demise of "Cats," the soon-to-be-missing "Miss Saigon" and the lack of any new hits from Andrew Lloyd Webber or the "Les Miz" team in years, the era of the Brit-generated mega-musical seems all but over. Happily, straight plays seem to be filling the gap. Demanding dramas like Michael Frayn's "Copenhagen" have become unlikely Broadway hits, while the Manhattan Theatre Club, an off-Broadway stalwart, successfully transferred two strong works, "Proof" and "The Tale of the Allergist's Wife...