"Counterpoint" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Violin, overcome by the surging counterpoint, ceased playing, and with the adroitness of a Raleigh turned to the Prince and said, "Pardon me, your Royal Highness, I fear we have been carried away by the vortex of the melody." The execution of chamber compositions belonging to the higher walks of counterpoint is frequently disappointing, but ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... stay for awhile; so rare is it, that Pons surely deserves our respectful esteem. His personal failure may seem anomalous, but he frankly admitted that he was weak in harmony. He had neglected the study of counterpoint; there was a time when he might have begun his studies afresh and held his own among modern composers, when he might have been, not certainly a Rossini, but a Herold. But he was alarmed by the intricacies of modern orchestration; and at length, ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... up the lower side of the little street called Puteaux until he reached a stupid, overgrown building. It was numbered 5, and was a shabby sort of pension. The Pole painfully hobbled up the evil-smelling stairway, more crooked than a youth's counterpoint, and on the floor next to the top halted, breathing heavily. The weather was oppressive and he had talked too much to the young ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... melody or counterpoint sung or played above a theme. Highest part sung in part music. Discussion or discourse ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... a new opera from a young and unknown composer, the "Caduta de' Giganti," one of Gluck's very earliest works, written when he was yet corrupted with all the vices of the Italian method. "Mein Gott! he is an idiot," said Handel; "he knows no more of counterpoint then mein cook." Handel did not see with prophetic eyes. He never met Gluck afterward, and we do not know his later opinion of the composer of "Orpheus and Eurydice" and "Iphigenia in Tauris." But Gluck had ever the profoundest admiration for the author of the "Messiah." ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... prose-writing there must be scales run, fingerings worked out, and harmonies mastered. For in a page of lo bello stile you will find trills and arpeggios, turns, grace notes, a main theme, a sub theme, thorough-bass, counterpoint, and form. ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... it all for a minute or two as the south-west wind went past his ears, and played a strange tune on the innumerable stems of the bents and the hard-stalked blossoms, to which the bees sang counterpoint. Then the heart arose within him, and he drew the sword from the scabbard, and waved it about his head, and shook it toward the south, and cried out, "Now, welcome world, and be thou blessed from one end to the other, from the ocean sea ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris
... who flourished at Arezzo, in Italy, during the 11th century, the first to promote the theoretical study of music; he is credited, amongst other things, with the invention of counterpoint, and was the first to designate notes by means of alphabetical letters, and to establish ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... a monk of the 13th century, in the solitude of his convent, made the grand discovery of counterpoint, or the science of harmony, as distinguished from melody; he also invented the present system of notation, and gave those names to the sounds of the diatonic scale still in use:—ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la, si; these being the first ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 337, October 25, 1828. • Various |
