Word: wailful
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...Mirza's sitar seemed to wail out emotion in a vocal idiom characteristic of the centuries-old Kirana school in which he was trained. While other schools of sitar-playing emphasize greater instrumentality, Mirza's "singing sitar style offers a welcome depth of feeling to the western listener who has difficulty intellectualizing the sophisticated raga system...
...scene is an unhealthy-looking cornfield, dark night, no moon. Suddenly police sirens wail, the orchestra sends up shrieks-of-terror music, and automobile headlights pierce the cornstalks, blinding the audience. Police spotlights swim through the corn as two men break through and hurl themselves to the ground. The lights move away, the sirens fade, the men get to their feet, dust themselves off, and begin the harrowing story of long-suffering, downtrodden George and his simple-minded buddy Lennie. Of Mice and Men is once more on the stage, not as a play but an opera...
...their horns are, at least to Brazilian ears, disappointingly meek. As a result, manufacturers of install-it-yourself kits do a booming business in noisemakers. The beetles' mewling toot is replaced by full-throated klaxons that belt out bars of hard-rock music or soar into the oscillating wail of European ambulances. The VW's short-stroke engine remains untouched, but its exhaust is channeled through complicated "extractors" or straight pipe "resonators" that make the humble bug sound like a snarling Ferrari or thundering Offenhauser. A less expensive gimmick is to wire a bottle of water under...
...measure of the terror of the obsession itself that from the perspective of good health and at the distance of art Mayer still confronts the horror obliquely--through understatement, burlesque, and nonchalance. But do not be misled by these devices into doubting the seriousness of Mayer's purpose. The wail of fear drones in the songs (some of which, like "Cat Scratch Fever," recur in his shows as anthems), in the abruptness of the pacing and in the roller-coaster whirling of the stage machinery. In Job as in Jesus the references, the allusions, the modulations of mood...
...when we ultimately become whatever it is we now are to be, when we finally arrive wherever it is we now are going, I have the feeling that we will then--and only then--realize the futility of Paul McCartney's wail as it echoes tinnily on the edge of our collective consciousness...