Word: sheerness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...which the chorus sang for half an hour without emitting a single word, Vaughan Williams' extraordinary Flos Campi. In this piece the chorus vocalizes on all kinds of vowel sounds and musically sustainable consonants. The composer was not interested in expressing ideas, but rather in evoking moods by exploiting sheer sonority and tonal colors. Occasionally there appeared such typical Vaughan Williams features as chordal parallelism; but mixed in with them were wonderful wailing appoggiaturas and, above all non-Western melodic lines that so characteristically turned back on themselves--which suffused the whole with a subtle, intoxicating exoticism. An important role...
...canvas is monumental in composition, dramatic in detail. It speaks-screams-of fate's flashing changes. An ordinary man overboard suddenly confronts the jaws of death. No softening atmosphere mists the facts. No historical, mythologic or literary connotations blur the issue. For sheer pity and terror, the picture stands alone in its age, when art either eulogized, moralized or titillated...
...overall effect of this production is a sheer joy. Should any one tell you otherwise, just reply, "Pishery-pashery! Go snick up, you gibble-gabbling trullibubs!" and hie to Wellesley on a Schulmacher's holiday for this triple-Dekker treat...
...permanent night underground is not for sissies, as many a bruised alpinist knows after haughtily trying subterranean slumming. The most rugged U.S. cave, West Virginia's hellish Schoolhouse−featuring such obstacles as "bottomless" (down to 70 ft.) fissures and sheer-rock faces that long defied human spiders, 180-ft. dropoffs past receding walls in thin air−can be negotiated by the most skilled mountaineers in eight to ten hours, round trip. As the bat flies, Schoolhouse is a mere 1,600 ft. long, but the rate of travel for the best spelunkers is less than...
Jack Benny: "Basically, an actor of sheer comic genius rather than a true, essential comedian . . . Jack has been on top for a long time by playing 'himself; maybe the fact that he himself is exactly opposite to his public character has a lot to do with his limitless success...