Word: foghorns
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...floor and split into two unequal planes. Enter eleven dancers clad in black, red or white pajamas, their costumes slit wide to flash inner forearms and thighs. Slowly they start to spin, hop and shuffle in smooth synchronicity. Out of huge loudspeakers suspended from the ceiling comes the foghorn blast of a low note-like the opening of Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra-played by a synthesizer; later the music rises in a blast of brass to a Brucknerian apotheosis...
...Neill does use--a bottle of whiskey, a wedding dress--more prominence. He also clarifies the meaning of O'Neill masterly use of sounds (the first discussion of the play concerns the father's snoring). For example, the coughing of the tubercular son, the footsteps upstairs, the interfering foghorn add ominous dimensions to the play's atmosphere...
...switch to electronics onstage. Many of the new houses are so big and poorly designed that an actor would have to bellow to be heard in the balcony. Some, like the Uris, where Annie is now playing, have such bad acoustics that, without a little help, even a foghorn would sound like a wheeze to someone sitting in the back row. There seems in fact to be a conspiracy to drown out the voice. Some composers have turned from strings and woodwinds to ever louder brasses and electronic instruments. Even Ethel Merman, who has the strongest pipes in the business...
Zydeco, Chenier's musical style, sounds initially like rhythm and blues, mostly New Orleans with a pinch of primitive Chicago. Sometimes the saxophones break honkingly loose, sometimes they lay in one foghorn-like riff through an entire song. But the real musical underlay is Cajun, a musical cross-fertilization of Acadian immigrants driven from Nova Scotia by the British and Africans brought to rural Louisiana by slavery. Which explains both Zydeco's compelling rhythmic patterns and the fact that several of Chenier's numbers are sung in Cajun French...