Word: mockingbirds
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Composer Bernstein's Trouble in Tahiti (TIME, June 23, 1952) twangs the rather snarled relations of a bored suburban couple. In its breakfast-table and business-day vignettes, it takes on some of the flatness of its subject matter. But its mockingbird passages-as when a trio hymns the joys of Scarsdale or Shaker Heights-are brighter, and it gets very bright and funny when Singer Alice Ghostley, while meaning to sneer at the movie she's seen, rhapsodically pants over...
Peru's multi-octaved Yma Sumac, whose extraordinary voice ranges easily from a mockingbird soprano to a deep, womanly baritone, gave a concert in Manhattan's Carnegie Hall, so impressed the Herald Tribune's Composer-Critic Virgil Thomson that he wrote: "She belongs in the great houses of opera." Said Yma, who claims to be 24: "It's too late for me to do it . . . [Besides,] I make very much more money than if I sang in two cr three operas a year for the Metropolitan...
...might construct a little museum of sermonic models that were much used, but are now obsolete and ought to be retired . . . [One is the] Rocking Horse Sermon . . . which moves but does not go on, always charging but never advancing. Then there is what might fairly be called the Mockingbird Sermon . . . all the notes of someone else, either stolen or just imitated...
...society suggested Texas history as a theme, but Guion preferred to stick to folk patterns and impressions of Texas sights & sounds. Prairie Dusk, Part One of his 14-part suite, had more than just impressions; Composer Guion even worked in recordings of a Texas cricket singing, a mockingbird calling and a coyote howling. Among the other 13 parts were such plaintive songs as Buffalo Bayou Song and Wild Geese Over Palestine, Texas, an item entitled Ride, Cowboy, Ride!, with staccato hoofbeats, and for a climax, a low-down blues piece called High Steppin' Lula Belle May Ida Brown...
Every writer has to look for the bluebird of his own true style, but most of them cage a mockingbird first-and it warbles shamelessly in the accents of others. Hortense Calisher is in the rare situation of having both birds in the cage at once: her first volume of short stories, In the Absence of Angels, gives the impression of being an anthology of compositions by disciples of Marcel Proust, George Orwell and Elizabeth Bowen-and one seriously talented writer named Hortense Calisher...