"Unmusical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... would amply justify him in such an indulgence had he wished to gratify it. No one, however, could remain unaware of the wonderful musical qualities of the instrument. Its rich and melodious tones would commend themselves even to the most unmusical ear, and formed a subject of constant remark. I noticed also that my brother's knowledge of the violin had improved in a very perceptible manner, for it was impossible to attribute the great beauty and power of his present performance entirely to the excellence of the instrument he was ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner
... laughed merrily, and Fouchette gave forth a singular, low, unmusical tinkle. She was astonished that the young lady should put such a question, then amused as she thought of Mother Podvin ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... trick of the imagination to have been carried away into an impossible and grotesque world. The hum of eager conversation, the popping of corks, the little trills of feminine laughter, all blended into one sensual and not unmusical chorus, seemed to fade from his ears. He fancied himself in some subterranean place of vast dimensions, through the grim galleries of which men and women with evil faces crept like animals. And towering above them, unreal in size, his scornful face ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... away with as much quiet dignity as they had exhibited when they approached us. The number in sight had meantime increased to nearly 2,000 men, who were arranged in tolerably good military order. When they received our answer, they raised a not unmusical war-cry and, extending their lances, hurried forward with a quick step. We sat still by the side of our cooking-vessels as if the affair did not concern us, until the foremost of the el-moran had reached the specified bush. Johnston then caused the signal to be ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... universally developed, as birds universally sing when they are so engaged? But alas! we do like cowbirds and cuckoos, which lay their eggs in nests which other birds have built, and cheer no traveller with their chattering and unmusical notes. Shall we forever resign the pleasure of construction to the carpenter? What does architecture amount to in the experience of the mass of men? I never in all my walks came across a man engaged in so simple and natural ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... "All the peasantry in Mallorca seem to know one tune and one only, in a minor key, with a compass of three whole tones. It is not unmusical, but, like the sereno's chant, it is hard to catch." As I happened to know the air, the least I could do was to dot it down in her note-book when she asked me to. The book flew open as she passed it across the deal table-top, ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... rear of the Government buildings; and squatting upon mats on the ground were the musicians, three or four in number, beating away vigorously at their very unmusical drums—just the size and shape of a flat cheese, their drumsticks being shaped like a crook. Soon the war-dancers appeared upon the scene, each with a whoop and a flourish of his knife or tomahawk. Conspicuous among them was Blackstone—no longer ...
— Missionary Work Among The Ojebway Indians • Edward Francis Wilson
... to be unmusical; but without dwelling on the patronage extended to the organ-grinder, without seeking to found any argument on the prevalence of the jew's trump, there is surely one instrument that may be said to be national in the fullest acceptance of the word. The herdboy in the broom, already ...
— The Wrong Box • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... constant use, is elegantly designated "a jumper;" and heavy knee riding boots with spurs. The name in which he seemed to be recognised, from its frequent mention by the company, was Smith. Adding to his uncouth appearance and wild gesticulation, he had a voice decidedly unmusical; while his conversation was copiously interlarded with expletives, anathematizing some portion of his anatomy. This was the presiding spirit of ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... Cabotia, the other States America, and the Southern continent Columbia." He then proposed, in irony, a list of a few "Cabotian words"—happify, gunning, belittle, quiddle, composuist, sot, etc. Lengthy he stigmatizes as "a foolish, flat, unauthorized, unmusical Indian word".[12] In conclusion (Port Folio, I, page 370), "let then the projected volume of foul and unclean things bear his own Christian name ...
— The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850 • Albert Smyth
... kedge you," she said, as they mounted the front, outdoor stair; following her speech with a slight, unmusical laugh, and fanning herself ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable
... complexity in music, a limit set not by the nature of music itself, but by its place in human economy. This limit, though clear in principle, is altogether variable in practice; duly cultivated people will naturally place it higher than the unmusical would. In other words, popular music needs to be simple, although elaborate music may be beautiful to the few. When elaborate music is the fashion among people to whom all music is a voluptuous mystery, ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... and Walter emitted a most unmusical brawl. "Of course, you and Ed are keeping the contract. You are doing as you please. Behold Ed now, carrying Cora over ...
— The Motor Girls Through New England - or, Held by the Gypsies • Margaret Penrose
... It is true, the body is the medium through which the soul, the real man, gives expression to thought and feeling; and yet voice that is simply mechanical or physical is always common and meaningless and as a rule unmusical. The normal condition of true artistic voice is emotional ...
— The Renaissance of the Vocal Art • Edmund Myer
... we know what you're saying, As your eye glances over these Notes: 'What asses are these that are braying With flat and unmusical throats? Who writes such unspeakable patter? Is it lunatics, idiots—or who?' And you think there is 'something the matter.' Well, we think ...
— The Scarlet Gown - being verses by a St. Andrews Man • R. F. Murray
... village at night, at intervals uttering a loud cry or a fierce howl, which is caught up and echoed by all the chowkeydars of the neighbouring villages. It is a weird, strange sound, cry after cry echoing far away, distance beyond distance, till it fades into faintness. At times it is not an unmusical cry, but when he howls out close to your tent, waking you from your first dreamless sleep, you do not feel it to be so. The chowkeydar has to see that no thieves enter the village by night. He protects the herds and property of the villagers. If a theft or crime occurs, ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... in a refreshing silence. It was very heavenly to stand there and feel the cool, soft air—unaccompanied, for the first time during the day, by the rattling rumbling sounds of locomotion and the jarring discordant murmurs of unmusical voices—fanning her ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... seventies; that he was one with the French Romanticists and rebels has long since been acknowledged a fact in select circles, both in France and Germany, and if we still have Wagner with us in England, if we still consider Nietzsche as a heretic, when he declares that "Wagner was a musician for unmusical people," it is only because we are more removed than we imagine, from all the great movements, intellectual and otherwise, which take place ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... raised as to the reason of Paderewski's remarkable hold on an audience; wherein lay his power over the musical and unmusical alike. Whenever he played there was always the same intense hush over the listeners, the same absorbed attention, the same spell. The superficial attributed these largely to his appearance and manner; the more thoughtful looked deeper. ...
— Piano Mastery - Talks with Master Pianists and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... evenings there is absolutely nothing for me to do except to inflict long epistles upon you. Dear Daddy seems to be making up for some of the lost sleep of his youth, and is apt to begin early the unmusical ...
— Sweetapple Cove • George van Schaick
... of our virtue was broken, and I exchanged the place of friend for that unmusical, harsh-sounding title of whore. In the morning we were both at our penitentials; I cried very heartily, he expressed himself very sorry; but that was all either of us could do at that time, and the way being thus ...
— The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders &c. • Daniel Defoe
... same changelessness of expression in the other dark faces as he had seen in Silvertip's. It struck him forcibly. When they spoke in their soft, guttural tones, or burst into a low, not unmusical laughter, or sat gazing stolidly into the fire, their faces seemed always the same, inscrutable, like the depths of the forest now hidden in night. One thing Joe felt rather than saw—these savages were ...
— The Spirit of the Border - A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley • Zane Grey
... perhaps reminiscent of Scott's narrative poems, which he was at that time reading aloud to us, "There is of Bebbington the holy peak!" To which I would as constantly rejoin, "'Of Bebbington the holy spire,' father!"—being offended by his use of a word so unmusical as peak. He would only smile and trudge onward. He was somewhat solicitous, I suspect, to check in his son any tendency towards mere poetical sentiment; his own imaginative faculty was rooted in common-sense, and he knew the value of the latter in curbing undue excursions ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... to a different region. It imitates nothing. It uses pure sound, and sound of the most wholly artificial kind—so artificial that the musical sounds of one race are unmusical, and therefore unintelligible, to another. Like architecture, music relies upon mathematical proportions. Unlike architecture, music serves no utility. It is the purest art of pleasure—the truest paradise and playground of the spirit. It has less power than painting, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... to sing or play with any amount of study. The gradations, too, are here quite as great as in mathematics or pictorial art, and the special faculty of the great musical composer must be reckoned many hundreds or perhaps thousands of times greater than that of the ordinary "unmusical" person above referred to. ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... of what was the matter. Most thought that the shores under the ship's bottom had carried away, and that we had fallen over on our bilge; and, strange to say, in our imaginary terror our eyes seemed to convey that impression. The ominous word "fire!" followed by the maddening unmusical efforts of a crazed bell, reduced all this din and uncertainty to a logical something. But where was it? What was on fire, the ship? Fortunately no; but a fire so close to the ship that she was in imminent danger of taking ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... true, and not unmusical, and what he lacked of finer qualities he made up in volume and force. His visitors joined in the singing, Kalman following the air in a low sweet ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor
... from the half hour to the hour, and from the hour to the half. Out of doors there was nothing stirring, unless the owl stirred between his unmusical notes, or Mr. Skip's dog did something but howl. Hardly a wagon passed, hardly a breath moved the leaves. Cindy, on her part, was lost in the fascination ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... words, as (taking the instances from the opening of his work): "suspectis sollicitis, adoptanti placebat" (I. 14); "deterius interpretantibus tristior, habebatur" (ib.); "Lusitaniam, specie legationis, seposuit" (I. 13). This is the unmusical way in which Bracciolini ends sentences with long words (taking the instances, also, from the commencement of the forgery): "victores longinquam militiam aspernabantur" (An. XI. 10):—"potissimum exaequaebantur ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... that Sunday morning, and it was quite clear that the new chapel would be full, and that Mr. Puddleham's first Sunday would be a success. And the chapel, of course, had a bell,—a bell which was declared by Mrs. Fenwick to be the hoarsest, loudest, most unmusical, and ill-founded miscreant of a bell that was ever suspended over a building for the torture of delicate ears. It certainly was a loud and brazen bell; but Mr. Fenwick expressed his opinion that ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... agreeable to dogs than others. If a composition in a certain key, the fundamental note of which is agreeable to a dog, be played, he will either listen quietly and intently to the sounds, or will, sometimes, utter low and not unmusical howls in accord or "in tune" with the fundamental note. If the music be in a key not pleasing to him, he will either show absolute indifference, or will express his dissatisfaction with discordant yelps not in accord with the ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... generation both in Felix and his sisters, failed entirely in his brother, who, to save his life, could never have sung "God save the Queen." In the little theatrical performances of the whole family for which Felix composed the music, and his sister Fanny (Hensel) some of the songs, the unmusical brother—was it not Paul?—had generally to be provided with some such part as that of a night watchman, and he managed to get through his song with as much credit as the Nachtwaechter in the little town of Germany, where he sang or repeated, as I well remember, ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... are a poet, a slave to rhyme and meter, a son of the Muses," continued Sandoval, with an elegant wave of his hand, as though he were saluting, on the horizon, the Nine Sisters, "do you comprehend, can you conceive, how a language so harsh and unmusical as French can give birth to poets of such gigantic stature as our Garcilasos, our ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... to cope with. To make a somewhat less than perfect instrument like the human voice, cope always with two simultaneously is an indication that the young art of music has not yet emerged from its teens. This is one reason why most song is as yet so intrinsically unmusical. Its reach is, as a rule, forced to exceed its grasp. Also the accident of having a fine voice usually determines a singer's career, though a perfect vocal organ does not necessarily imply a musical nature. The best voices, ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... off by side whiskers rather light in color, and eyes that were cold and lusterless, but searching—these were the salient characteristics of a countenance that once seen, was never forgotten. His voice had a peculiar, piercing quality, though it was not unmusical in sound. In giving commands he spoke in brusque tones and in an imperious manner. It was not long till every man in the division had seen him and knew him well. In a few days he had fairly earned the soubriquet "Kill Cavalry," which clung to him till he left ...
— Personal Recollections of a Cavalryman - With Custer's Michigan Cavalry Brigade in the Civil War • J. H. (James Harvey) Kidd
... former, although it is now acknowledged to be an exquisitely poetic treatment of the weird legend, was voted sombre and dull, and "Tannhaeuser" was simply a puzzle. After listening to "Tannhaeuser," Schumann declared that Wagner was unmusical! Unless a person is familiar with Wagner's life, it is impossible to believe how bitter was the opposition to his theories and to his music. Does it seem possible now that he had to struggle for twenty-five years before ...
— The Loves of Great Composers • Gustav Kobb
... imagination. Silius is free from many of the faults of his contemporaries, the faults that spring from aspirations towards originality. He is content to be an imitator. In his style, as in his composition, Vergil is an obsession. But the echoes are muffled or unmusical. Gifted with ease and fluency and—for his age—comparative lucidity of diction, Silius has no true ear for music, nor true eye for beauty. His verse moves naturally but heavily. He is the most spondaic poet[621] of his age, and the spondaic rhythm is not alleviated by ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... as a great variety of sun birds flitting from flower to flower like living gems. It is to be admitted that the cries of those birds were not always in accord with the splendour of their plumage, being for the most part distinctly harsh and unmusical; but there was one exception that startled us not a little when we first heard it. Its cry was an exact reproduction of the sound of a sweet-toned bell, so exact, indeed, that for the moment I felt fully persuaded that, hidden somewhere ...
— The Strange Adventures of Eric Blackburn • Harry Collingwood
... of elaborating a musical score in the mind, and hearing it inwardly, is a gift which unmusical people find it difficult to comprehend, and which even puzzles many musical people. Yet it is a power which all students of music ought to possess; and, like other capacities, it can ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... Aged Pilot-man Mark Twain Tim Keyser's Nose Max Adeler The Lost Expression Marshall Steele A Night Scene Robert B. Brough Karl the Martyr Frances Whiteside The Romance of Tenachelle Hercules Ellis Michael Flynn William Thomson A Night with a Stork William G. Wilcox An Unmusical Neighbour William Thomson The Chalice David Christie Murray Livingstone Henry Lloyd In Swanage Bay Mrs. Craik Ballad of Sir John Franklin G. H. Boker Phadrig Crohoore J. S. Le Fanu Cupid's Arrows Eliza Cook The Crocodile's Dinner Party E. Vinton Blake ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... covered at each end with a bull's hide, producing a most barbarous noise, accompanied by a baba, or rattle, loud shouts, palaver, songs, and violent gesticulations, forming a system of confused uproar, unmusical, and ungraceful. Their motions are irregular, sometimes in violent contortion, and at others voluptuous and slow. Nothing can be done without a palaver; and at the change of every dance, he from whom the proposition originates, makes a solemn ...
— Observations Upon The Windward Coast Of Africa • Joseph Corry
... of you, continue to play; never awaken her," said Gerfaut; and, as if he were afraid his wish would not be granted, he began to pound in the bass without being disturbed by the unmusical sounds. ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... a gesture for him to rise. This he answered in an unseemly manner by ejecting from his mouth a brownish fluid, projecting it over and beyond the balustrade in front of him. Then looking upon me as if about to laugh, and yet with a grave face, he uttered something in an unmusical voice which I ...
— The Last American - A Fragment from The Journal of KHAN-LI, Prince of - Dimph-Yoo-Chur and Admiral in the Persian Navy • J. A. Mitchell
... began, for from no other man, I was confident, could have issued so sepulchral a plaint. It was unmusical, unbeautiful, unlively, and indescribably doleful. Yet the words showed that it should have ripped and crackled with high spirits and lawlessness, for the words ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... against Mozart and Wagner—that his operas were noisy and overloaded with learned accompaniments. The Italian opera was killed, not so much by the fact that The Beggar's Opera made its conventions ridiculous (for its conventions could at that time have been ridiculous only to quite unmusical people), as by the incontestable attraction of the new work itself. It was witty and outspoken, with abundance of topical satire; its music consisted of the tunes that everybody knew, and it presented the public with the irresistible fascinations ...
— Handel • Edward J. Dent
... Everything belonging to him moved with a certain jar, except, indeed, his household, which went on noiseless wheels, thanks to Lucy and love. As he came along the garden path, the gravel started all round his unmusical foot. Miss Wodehouse alone turned round to hail her father's approach, but both the young people looked up at her instinctively, and saw her little start, the falling of her knitting-needles, the little flutter of colour which surprise brought to her maidenly, ...
— The Rector • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... was so exactly like her in features that the two might have been twins, but he was a good three inches shorter than his sister, as well as a trifle thinner in the face. He talked incessantly in a sharp, high-pitched, and most unmusical voice, the unattractiveness of which was further heightened by a pronounced nasal American accent. From such scraps of his conversation as reached me from time to time I gathered that his talk was almost wholly about himself, his doings, his opinions, his likes and ...
— The First Mate - The Story of a Strange Cruise • Harry Collingwood
... a bee boomed somnolently among the red and yellow flowers, and somewhere near at hand a church bell jerked its unmusical summons ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... admired his style as peculiarly suited to the Latin language, which, being scanty and unmusical, requires more redundancy than the Greek. The simplicity of the Attic writers would make Latin composition bold and tame. To be perspicuous, the Latin must be full. Thus Arnold thinks that what Tacitus gained in energy he lost in elegance and perspicuity. But Cicero, dealing with a barren ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... pleasant message may make an unmusical tongue!" said Fleda, as she and Hugh made their way up to ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... I was always fond of a jingle; but, to tell you the truth, I would rather have the same jingle in my purse than in my instrument. Divil such an unmusical purse ever a man was cursed with than I have been doomed to ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... one point of view, even more distinguished than as a poet. The German language easily lends itself to all the purposes of poetry; like the ladies of the Middle Ages, it is gracious and compliant to the Troubadours. But as these same ladies were often crusty and repulsive to their unmusical mates, so the German language generally appears awkward and unmanageable in the hands of prose writers. Indeed, the number of really fine German prosaists before Heine would hardly have exceeded the numerating powers of a New Hollander, ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... Through the heavy tropical rain which had been pouring almost incessantly since the arrival of the Sumter, covering the calm water of the harbour with little dancing jets, and drumming on the steamer's decks the most unmusical of tattoos, a little dingy was seen approaching, and in due time brought alongside of the Confederate man-of-war the master of a Baltimore brig, which, was lying at anchor some little distance off. The worthy skipper had heard of the terrible ...
— The Cruise of the Alabama and the Sumter • Raphael Semmes
... washed and put away her few dishes, then took the children out on the porch. Violet wanted to be "wocked," so she sat beside her in the big porch chair. Pansy ran up and down uttering queer unmusical noises. The piano in the other part of the house was accompanying ...
— A Modern Cinderella • Amanda M. Douglas
... was in his heart but I should wish to get into mine. So let me have the Book as fast as may be. And do others like it if you will take circumbendibuses for sound's sake! And excuse the Critic who seems to you so unmusical; and say, It is the nature of beast! Adieu, dear Friend: write ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... monarch had nodded graciously and from the silver bower the lady had smiled softly, so that the duke had no reason for dissatisfaction; the attitude of the crowd was of small moment, an unmusical accompaniment to the potent pantomime, of which the principal figures were Francis, the King Arthur of Europe, and the princess, queen of ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... overtake the legislature that still from year to year permits Tahoe to retain its unmusical cognomen! Tahoe! It suggests no crystal waters, no picturesque shores, no sublimity. Tahoe for a sea in the clouds: a sea that has character and asserts it in solemn calms at times, at times in savage storms; a sea ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... several times successively. These last are said to have a tone; the others are not allowed to have any. If we wish to give nonelastic bodies a tone, it will be necessary to make them continue their sound, by repeating our blows quickly upon them. This will effectually give them a tone; and an unmusical instrument has often by this means a fine effect in concerts. The effects of a drum depend upon this principle. Gold, silver, copper, and iron, which are elastic metals, are sonorous; but lead, which possesses scarcely any elasticity, produces little or no tone. Tin, which in itself has very ...
— Popular Lectures on Zoonomia - Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and Disease • Thomas Garnett
... closer to him than motherly Mrs. Tully or the half-breed girl, albeit the housekeeper sang to him the lullabys that mothers know while the Digger girl, improvising blank verse paeans of praise and prophecy, crooned them to her charge in the unmusical monotone of her tribal tongue. His father, on the contrary, wasted no time in singing, but would toss him to the ceiling or set him astride his foot and swing him until he screamed in ecstasy. Moreover, his father took him on wonderful journeys ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... which are called fast. This is the life of the town; and indeed as the whole place is dependent on the railway, so is the railway held in favor and beloved. The noise of the engines is not disliked, nor are its puffings and groanings held to be unmusical. With us a locomotive steam-engine is still, as it were, a beast of prey, against which one has to be on one's guard—in respect to which one specially warns the children. But there, in the Western States, it has been taken to the bosoms of them all as a domestic ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... quatrains should have their rhymes regularly recurring; either in both first and third, and second and fourth lines; or only in second and fourth. A rhyme occurring only in first and third lines gives an unmusical cast, since it causes the stanza to end unrhymed. Secondly, the words fence and scent do not form a legitimate rhyme. The easy correctness of the metre is an encouraging sign, and indicates a poetic talent which Miss Allen would ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... the restless Indian night, some far away, some near at hand, there is one which, when it commences, drowns all the rest. It is a harsh, metallic, rasping, shrill, unmusical sound. It might seem as if it had to do with some machinery, except that it is unlike the sound of any machine that you ever heard. It begins in the room where you are sitting reading, or else out in the verandah, where you are enjoying ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... and gloomy bazaar the din of hundreds of wooden hammers on as many pieces of copper being made into jugs, trays, pots or pans, is simply deafening, echoed as it is under the vaulted roofs, the sound waves clashing in such an unmusical and confused way as to be absolutely diabolical. A few of these copper vessels are gracefully ornamented and inlaid, but the majority are coarse in their manufacture. They are exported all over the country. ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... fronting the Major's. His right hand was extended, closely grasping the right hand of his friend which he scarce perceptibly, though measuredly, lifted and let fall throughout the length of all the curious performance. The voice was not unmusical, nor was the quaint old ballad-air adopted by the singer unlovely in the least; simply a monotony was evident that accorded with the levity and chance-finish of the improvisation—and that the song was improvised on the instant I am certain—though in no wise remarkable, for other ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley
... unmusical sound, Nor jars interpose, sacred friendship to grieve. For generous lovers let a corner be found, Where they in soft sighs may their ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... attention while he was speaking, but her eye wandered away the moment he had finished and rested searchingly on the other gentlemen. Evidently she missed a face she had expected to find there, for her colour changed and she drew back behind the other ladies with the light, unmusical laugh women sometimes use to hide ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... to thankfulness of heart as David's recital of the travails and triumphs of ancient Israel. Certain it is that profound gratitude to God and devotion to duty characterized the lives of most of these men and women who sang the praises of their Maker in this halting and unmusical fashion. ...
— The Wizard's Daughter and Other Stories • Margaret Collier Graham
... now they faced the brilliant northern lights flashing up the sky, and that either this appearance or some of the whaling narrations of Kinraid had stirred up Daniel Robson's recollections of a sea ditty, which he kept singing to himself in a low, unmusical voice, the burden of which was, 'for I loves the tossin' say!' Bell met them ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. I • Elizabeth Gaskell
... one—she's a fright! I hate that one—she's so affected. Those two look common; I won't have anything to do with them. The big one with spectacles looks horribly learned. The one with the violin has a most unmusical face. She looks fit for stratagems if you like! The little one in brown is a cunning fox, I can see it in her eyes. Of all the plain, uninteresting, ...
— Tom and Some Other Girls - A Public School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... corner, and the bandoliers thrown on the ground. There were a couple of hammocks for the patients' use, and in these two of them passed the night. Before retiring to rest, they produced their pipes and foul-smelling Boer tobacco, proceeding to light up just under my windows, meanwhile talking their unmusical language with great volubility. At length, about ten, they appeared to slumber, and a chorus of snoring arose, which generally sent me to sleep, to be awakened two or three hours later by renewed conversations, which now and then died away into hoarse whispers. I always imagined they were discussing ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... a bedroom in the hotel, and tired out, tried to sleep; but the occupants of the cafe began a set of howling songs, very unmusical, and kept us awake till past twelve. We have never heard this ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon
... exclaimed, throwing just the right reflection of sympathy into her not unmusical voice. "I called before, but you were unfit to see any one then. I took the liberty of bringing a friend to see you—the ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... wish to teach you how to read, and to tell you what there is to read." The same is my wish in regard to the French Novel. What has been done in it—not what these, even the practitioners themselves, have said of it—is the burden of my possibly unmusical song. ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... to the fire and stood beside the chief. It was evident to them that his end was imminent. He sang in a low, not unmusical tone the death-chant of the Hurons. His companions silently bowed their heads. When he had finished singing he slowly rose to his great height, showing a commanding figure. Slowly his features lost their stern pride, his face softened, and his dark eyes, gazing straight ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... of the hills, now mystically veiled in radiance. She stood motionless, watching their melting, elusive changes from palpitating rose to the transparent purple of amethyst. The stillness of evening was broken by the monotonous, not unmusical creaking of a Persian wheel at some little distance to the left of the tent. The well stood in a little grove of trees; between their branches she could see, when she turned her head, the coloured saris of the village women, where they stood in groups chattering as they drew the water, ...
— Stories by English Authors: Orient • Various
... and Mr. Solomon spoke of his "long attenuated fingers." He made money and that was useful to him, for doctors' bills and living had taken up his savings. There was talk of his settling in London, but the climate, not to speak of the unmusical atmosphere, would have been fatal to him. Wagner succumbed to both, sturdy fighter that ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... TRIANGLE (The), Lord Castlereagh; afterwards marquis of Londonderry; so called by William Hone. The first word is a pun on the title, the second refers to his lordship's oratory, a triangle being the most feeble, monotonous, and unmusical of all musical instruments. Tom Moore compares the oratory of Lord Castlereagh to "water ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... Sophia. Wither's song, "Shall I wasting in Despair," is certainly superior to the SONG TO ALTHEA. Wither was frequently equal to Lovelace in poetical imagery and sentiment, and he far excelled him in versification. The versification of Lovelace is indeed more rugged and unmusical than that of any other writer of the period, and this blemish is so conspicuous throughout LUCASTA, and is noticeable in so many cases, where it might have been avoided with very little trouble, that ...
— Lucasta • Richard Lovelace
... impels him to a vow (verse 50). He will give thanks to God among the nations. God's mercies bind, and, if rightly felt, will joyfully impel, the receiver to spread His name as far as his voice can reach. Love is sometimes silent, but gratitude must speak. The most unmusical voice is tuned to melody by God's great blessings received and appreciated, and they need never want a theme who can tell what the Lord has done for their souls. 'Then shall... the tongue of the dumb sing.' A dumb Christian is a monstrosity. We are 'the secretaries ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... people of inferior life, not to be possessed of the poems of Pomfret, as amongst persons of taste not to have the works of Pope in their libraries. The subjects upon which Pomfret wrote were popular, his versification is far from being unmusical, and as there is little force of thinking in his writings, they are level to the capacities of ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber
... acquire and equally difficult to write, owing to the existence of sounds that are not heard in any of the civilized tongues and not represented by any combination of the letters of the English alphabet. Though somewhat gutural it is not unmusical, and for the sake of euphony final consonants are often omitted in conversation. As for instance, the Inuit name for Repulse Bay, Iwillik, is more frequently called, "Iwillie," a really musical sound. And so with all such terminations. It is not difficult for a stranger ...
— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder
... "conk" of the wild-geese. Looking up, you see the black specks of that adventurous triangle, winging along in rapid flight northward. Perhaps it takes a wide returning sweep, in doubt; but it disappears in the north. There is no mistaking that sign. This unmusical "conk" is sweeter than the "kerchunk" of the bull-frog. Probably these birds are not idiots, and probably they turned back south again after spying out the nakedness of the land; but they have made their sign. Next day there is a rumor that somebody has ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... voice, not unmusical, singing a rousing chorus in Italian, and peering circumspectly through an open balustrade into that lower room, Captain Folsom saw the singer seated at a great square piano, a giant of a man with a huge shock of dark brown hair ...
— The Radio Boys with the Revenue Guards • Gerald Breckenridge
... overwrought and our flesh creeped. In our present mood it all seemed too strange, too mysterious for earth. We felt as if we had joined the land of shadows in very truth. But the verger's voice awoke us to realities: a very earthly voice, unmusical and pronounced, not at all in harmony with the moment. It grated upon us; nevertheless, under the circumstances, ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 6, June, 1891 • Various
... show us another and a better way across the mountain. He spoke in a very loud voice, and there was a singular repetition of phrases and arrangement of words, which rendered his speech striking, and not unmusical. ...
— The Life of Kit Carson • Edward S. Ellis
... along the course of a mountain torrent, whose sudden descent as it hurried toward the river, formed successive water-falls not unmusical in their cadence. A few purple beech and drooping willows with here and there a mountain ash, skirted the ravine that formed its bed; their leaves had fallen before the blasts of autumn, they seemed emblematic of myself; like me their glory had ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... indians wailing for the dead; then, that it was a band of pilgrims singing. But it turned out to be a company of cowboys, bringing cattle up for shipment to Tabasco. Some rode ahead, and, with loud but not unmusical cries, invited and urged the animals and their drivers to follow. The beasts were divided into three bands, thirty or forty in a band, each of which had its mounted drivers. The animals were lively, and we were warned that they ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr
... shows a complete misunderstanding of the case. Because you neither play nor sing, it by no means follows that you are unmusical. If you love music and appreciate it, you may be more musical than many pianists and singers; or latent within you and only awaiting the touchstone of music there may be a deeper love and appreciation of the art than can be attributed to many ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... arising, doubtless, from their isolated position. It must be admitted, nevertheless, that this change if occasionally adopted in our polished dialect would afford an agreeable variety by no means unmusical. In conversation with a very learned Grecian on this subject, he seemed to consider because the learned are constantly, and sometimes very capriciously, introducing new words into our language, that such words as ...
— The Dialect of the West of England Particularly Somersetshire • James Jennings
... discordance; dissonance, cacophony, want of harmony, caterwauling; harshness &c. 410. Babel[Confused sounds]; Dutch concert, cat's concert; marrowbones and cleavers. V. be discordant &c. adj. .; jar &c. (sound harshly) 410. Adj. discordant; dissonant, absonant[obs3]; out of tune, tuneless; unmusical, untunable[obs3]; unmelodious, immelodious[obs3]; unharmonious[obs3], inharmonious; singsong; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... called beautiful. She was tall, with brown eyes and a fine spun mass of golden-brown hair. She had a gentle smile, that disclosed white, even teeth. Her voice was not unmusical. She was twenty-three years old and possessed a husband who, though only twenty-six, had already shown such strength of character and such aptitude at the criminal branch of the law that he was now a candidate for the post of district attorney on ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.
... librettos—librettos which have some clear unmusical meaning of their own beyond which the audience cannot penetrate to the meaning of the music, if it has any. This libretto, apart from the music, is so nearly meaningless, it has so little coherence, that one ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... His visit here was marked by a succession of ovations. No other pianist ever achieved such a wonderful success, not only among musicians, but among the people of all classes. Musicians were astounded at his remarkable knowledge, while musical and unmusical people alike were carried off their feet by the whirlwind-style of his playing. It was full of grace, nobility, breadth, and dignity; but it combined with these qualities a fire, an intensity, and a passion which sometimes ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... like the poor, we have always with us, and on windy days even the large-sized rook is blown about the murkiness which does duty for sky over London; and on such occasions its coarse, corvine dronings seem not unmusical, nor without something of a tonic effect on our jarred nerves. And here the ordinary Londoner has got to the end of his ornithological list—that is to say, his winter list. He knows nothing about those wind-worn waifs, the "occasional visitors" to the metropolis—the pilgrims to distant ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... you blaming Farrow? He's a good fellow. He sings. No real scoundrel can sing. Read any novel, any newspaper report. 'The prisoner's voice was harsh and unmusical.' You've seen those ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... war-dance is not danced (as is the Dyak) to a lively measure of gongs and drums, a wind instrument being used constructed out of a gourd and three short pieces of bamboo. This is called a Kaluri, and although possessing but five separate notes in a minor key, the tone is not unmusical, though very melancholy. The dance itself has a history, the first part representing two warriors meeting on the war-path. An exciting combat then ensues in which one is killed, and the survivor is indulging in a solitary ...
— On the Equator • Harry de Windt
... quog, quog! A very unmusical note: This eminent basso, Mr. Frog, Has surely a cold in his throat. But he does his best, with a good intent, The little speckled man; For every frog must sing in Lent, As loud as ever ...
— The Nursery, March 1877, Vol. XXI. No. 3 - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers • Various
... produce a novel impression on one who has been accustomed to the green American forests. Then there was the endless sound of wooden shoes clattering over the rough pavements, and people talking in that most unmusical of all languages, low Dutch. Walking at random through the streets, we came by chance upon the Cathedral of Notre Dame. I shall long remember my first impression of the scene within. The lofty gothic ceiling arched far above my head ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... an impression of weakness, as if, for example, it should speak, that a small piping voice would come struggling up from below. Baba looked up with alarm, but the goblin greeted him with a smile, and said, "Merry Christmas, Nick," in a deep, strong and not unmusical voice, which came boldly up and out ...
— Nick Baba's Last Drink and Other Sketches • George P. Goff
... Wagner suffered more than any other German through its decay and enfeeblement, from its manifold losses and mutilations of form, from its unwieldy particles and clumsy construction, and from its unmusical auxiliary verbs. All these are things which have entered the language through sin and depravity. On the other hand, he was exceedingly proud to record the number of primitive and vigorous factors still extant in the current speech; and in the tonic strength ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... insipidity. The Mutation in some degree of it was extremely noxious to a true poet, our Spenser; and he was the more injudicious by lengthening his stanza in a language so barren of rhymes as ours, and in which several words, whose terminations are of similar sounds, are so rugged, uncouth, and unmusical. The consequence was, that many lines which he forced into the service to complete the quota of his stanza are unmeaning, or silly, or tending to weaken the thought ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... bow in reverence. But it may not be; we cannot receive him as a true poet—as in any poetic quality the peer of his matchless wife. We hear much of his subtile psychology—we deem it psychological unintelligibility. His rhythm is rough and unmusical, his style harsh and inverted, his imagery cold, his invective bitter, and his verbiage immense. His illustrations are sometimes coarse, his comparisons diminish rather than increase the importance of the ideas to which they are applied. His ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... and latterly also Browning, with protests against his obscurity and his occasionally most unmusical English. The inspiration of his brave and optimistic philosophy she felt strongly. She was extremely fond of reading Dante, and she was better acquainted with German and Italian poetry than most cultivated women. ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... climb! The sun had set, and the long twilight was giving way to darkness when they came down the trail into the upper end of the camp. Some embryo artist was painfully overworking an accordion, while a dog rendered melancholy by the unmusical noise, occasionally accompanied him with prolonged howls. A belated ore trailer, with the front wagon creaking under the whine of the brakes and the chains of the six horses clanking, lurched down from a road on the far side of the long, straggling street, and passed them, ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... so as he stepped into the light of the fire he merely uttered in a loud tone the word "Kla-quitch," to catch their attention. He succeeded. A dozen startled heads turned toward him, and as he spoke his talisman again, and moved toward them, there came a hysterical howl from a dozen most unmusical throats, and his audience, followed by the women, children, and dogs of the village, all shrieking in chorus, vanished into the night. It was a striking tribute to the memory and prowess of Kla-quitch (who, it was naturally supposed, had appeared and announced ...
— The Penance of Magdalena & Other Tales of the California Missions • J. Smeaton Chase
... or grasshoppers. The stridulation produced by some of the Locustidae is so loud that it can be heard during the night at the distance of a mile (27. L. Guilding, 'Transactions of the Linnean Society,' vol. xv. p. 154.); and that made by certain species is not unmusical even to the human ear, so that the Indians on the Amazons keep them in wicker cages. All observers agree that the sounds serve either to call or excite the mute females. With respect to the migratory locusts of Russia, Korte has ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... absolutely no reason why any musical person should have an unmusical voice, especially since this bad production of the voice often strains the muscles and inflames the mucous membrane of the throat. In connection with this question of music, it should be remembered that almost ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk
... labourers prophesied snow. The sounds in the air arose again, as Susan sat still and silent. They were of a different character to what they had been during the prevalence of the east wind. Then they had been shrill and piping; now they were like low distant growling; not unmusical, but strangely threatening. Susan went to the window, and drew aside the little curtain. The whole world was white—the air was blinded with the swift and heavy fall of snow. At present it came down straight, but Susan knew those ...
— Half a Life-Time Ago • Elizabeth Gaskell
... stalked a large heron, an elegant bird, with long, scarlet legs, gray plumage, and a gracefully curved neck. When the bird reached the threshold it stopped, and without warning gave vent to a prolonged series of shrill, unmusical sounds. The startled priest sat up in his bed and ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... and more slipped by, during which, still philosophical, he walked slowly round and round the table, straightening a candle here, altering a dish there, humming all the while in a not unmusical voice the ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... rather inconsistent with one's notions of the delicacy and tenderness of woman. Few of them are even passably well-looking. All the natural playfulness of the gentler sex seems to be crushed out of them; and while their manners are uncouth, their voices are the wildest and most unmusical that ever fell upon the ear from a feminine source. When dressed in their best attire they usually wear a profusion of red handkerchiefs about their heads and shoulders; and from an unpicturesque habit they have of making an upper waist immediately under their arms by a ligature ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... a bird that lived up in a tree, And all he could whistle was "Fiddle-dee-dee"— A very provoking, unmusical song For one to be whistling the summer day long! Yet always contented and busy was he With that vocal recurrence ...
— Love-Songs of Childhood • Eugene Field
... steadiness of our own nerves. The Thirteenth Regiment was at the height of its prosperity then; our band, under the leadership of Fred Inness, was the best in the city. I remembered it well because, in the parade on Decoration Day, I was on horseback riding a somewhat unmusical horse. It was comforting, if not strictly true, to read in the newspaper the following day that "Doctor Talmage rides his ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... discovering beauties invisible even to its mother's eyes, and working early and late on dainty garments, rich in the embroidery which she now thanked Prue for teaching her against her will. The touch of the baby hands seemed to heal her sore heart; the sound of the baby voice, even when most unmusical, had a soothing effect upon her nerves; the tender cares its helplessness demanded absorbed her thoughts, and kept her happy in a new world whose delights she ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... people. At his command, the most celebrated writers of Greece and India were translated into the Persian language; a smooth and elegant idiom, recommended by Mahomet to the use of paradise; though it is branded with the epithets of savage and unmusical, by the ignorance and presumption of Agathias. [53] Yet the Greek historian might reasonably wonder that it should be found possible to execute an entire version of Plato and Aristotle in a foreign dialect, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... humbly; her eyes were shy and would not meet his. He winced as he heard the name, though her voice was not unmusical. ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... Her voice was unmusical, vulgar and husky from much weeping. Magically, though, she had checked her sobbing to an occasional hard gulp that clicked down in ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... it. She always wore a bonnet, even at meal times; and was supposed by those who were not intimately acquainted with the mysteries of her toilet, to sleep in it; often, indeed, she did sleep in it, and gave unmusical evidence of her doing so. She was not ill-natured; but so strongly prejudiced on many points as to be equally disagreeable as though she were so. With her, as with the world in general, religion was the point on which those prejudices were the strongest; and ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... in their character, and are, on the whole, even in their intensity, no measure of the beauty of the music which arouses them. Indeed, we can get intense emotion from sound which is entirely unmusical. So, too, loudness, softness, crescendo, diminuendo, volume, piercingness, have their emotional accompaniments. It is to Hanslick that we owe the general summing up of these possibilities of expression ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... the sultan, was an extempore declaimer, shouting forth praises of his master, with his pedigree; near him was one who bore the long wooden frumfrum, on which ever and anon he blew a blast loud and unmusical. Nothing could be more ridiculous than the appearance of these people, squatting under the weight and magnitude of their bellies, while the thin legs that appeared underneath, but ill accorded with the bulk of the ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... 14th; they march off presently with muskets on their shoulders. In another place, just below me, are some soldiers squaring off logs to build a shanty—chopping away, and the noise of the axes sounding sharp. I hear the bellowing, unmusical screech of the mule. I mark the thin blue smoke rising from camp fires. Just below me is a collection of hospital tents, with a yellow flag elevated on a stick, and moving languidly in the breeze. Two discharged men (I know them both) are just ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... birds and the human glow of the more sensuous and earth-dwelling poets. But after awhile, after our first rather bleak introduction to them, we grow aware that these apparently undecorated and unmusical masterpieces are radiant and resounding with a beauty and a music which "eye hath not seen nor ear heard." For flowers we are given stars, for the song of birds the music of the spheres, and for that human ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... very bright and cheerful. The wood crackled briskly, the flames lit up the green foliage, and the moving figures of our attendants gave animation to the picture. Amongst ourselves there were a few snatches of song, and from up the hill where the Wallacks were camped came a chorus of not unmusical voices. One after another of our party dropped off, betaking himself to his natural rest. I was not the last, and must have slept as soon as I pulled the plaid over my ears, ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... poetic merit of the piece is, except for these lines, slight, while the songs and lyrical passages, which are rather freely interspersed, are almost all wooden and unmusical. Such interest as the play possesses is dependent on the plot. We have the conventional four characters: Arismena, the careless shepherdess, her lover Philaritus, and Castarina, whose affections lean towards the last, though she does not object to hold out some hope to her lover ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... light seemed to make the cow-boys and cattle nearest it lurch back and forward in and out of the gloom while their changing shadows danced fantastically over the prairie. Here the three riders paused again to listen. Closer by, the cow-boys' crooning would have sounded harsh and unmusical, but at this distance it shaped itself into a plaintive, minor melody that was very pleasing. For many moments they waited and enjoyed it in silence. Then suddenly a quick gust of wind and a low, muttering ...
— Southern Stories - Retold from St. Nicholas • Various
... every crab began scraping at his fiddle as hard as he could, and the sounds were so shrill and unmusical that Trot wondered when they would begin to play a tune. But they never did; it was one regular mix-up of sounds from beginning to end. When the noise finally stopped, the leader turned to his visitors and, waving his baton toward them, asked, ...
— The Sea Fairies • L. Frank Baum
... differs from most unmusical people," Sally responded, in a swift aside. "Even truthful people will fib valiantly, where music is concerned, and go into raptures, when they have hard work to suppress their yawns. It was a sorry day for music, ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray |
