Word: motif
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...reminiscent of buildings in New Orleans and Italy"--is none too definitive. Miss Porritt suggests that the building is "vaguely Italian Renaissance, although not in the same sense that Sever is Italian Renaissance." And an imaginative parent took one look at the plaster model and pegged it "houseboat motif...
...anticipation of Michael Flaksman's cello solo and Bartok's Bluebeard's Castle, one might have been able to ignore the unrelenting repetition of a simple motif in the opening Hebrides Overture (Fingal's Cave), by Mendelssohn. By attempting deafness, one might not have noticed that for a long time the brass were a measure out of step with the rest of the orchestra, and were playing so loudly that they could not hear their own error. Masochistic charity might have led one to expect the cold woodwind instruments to be out of tune at the beginning of a concert...
Kirchner's Concerto, commissioned by the Chamber Music Society of Baltimore and completed in 1960, is a vast rhapsody. Like a long cadenza, it exploits constant shifts of timbre, pace, and loudness. A recognizable motif stated at the beginning of the first of the two movements is repeated later by the French horn; aside from that recurrence, little apparent form but great passion animates the work...
...Bloch couple cavil at one another largely to disguise the monotony of their marriage; indeed, escape from boredom is a dominant motif in this Advocate. Miss Seager's prisoner braids straw into rope for nine pages; Fields' defeated heroine chain-smokes and walks those back-alley streets so familiar to devotees of the garbage-can school of prose; Porter's Margaret thinks of herself as "a character in an impossibly dull novel" (a self-interpretation which Porter threatens to actualize). This preoccupation with boredom strikes us as significant. We have heard that content must determine form...
...character named Hero speaks those lines with drawn cynicism in the climactic scene of The Rehearsal, one of the few glittering productions in the dismal new season on Broadway. It is the motif of the play and the motif of Playwright Jean Anouilh, who is perhaps the most produced of all living playwrights. Since the death of Jean Giraudoux almost 20 years ago, Anouilh (ahn-oo-ee) has been the essential voice of the French theater-a voice that speaks so dryly of shattered hope that you can almost hear it break...