"Semitone" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... whose perceptions were not acute enough for him to notice the difference of a semitone. 'I should have thought you were fond of it. There was always some on the table at Farleigh, ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... of all, the one which pervades the drama from beginning to end, is the love-motive. Its fundamental form is that in which it appears in the second bar of the Prelude in the oboe (No. 1).[35] Variants of it occur without the characteristic semitone suspension (1a) or with a falling seventh (1b). The cello motive of the opening phrase of the Prelude may also be considered as derived from the same by ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... morning swim. Happy couple! The morning gave them both a freshness and innocence above human. They seemed to Clara made of morning air and clear lake water. Crossjay's voice ran up and down a diatonic scale with here and there a query in semitone and a laugh on a ringing note. She wondered what he could have to talk of so incessantly, and imagined all the dialogue. He prattled of his yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow, which did not imply past ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... cried out, "Let the noble family of Eglinton pass," and then added the line which followed the one he had just given out rather mal-apropos—"Nor stand in sinners' way." One peculiarity I remember, which was, closing the strain sometimes by an interval less than a semitone; instead of the half-note preceding the close or key-note, they used to take the quarter-note, the effect of which had a peculiar gurgling sound, but I never heard it elsewhere. It may be said these Scottish tunes were unscientific, and their performance rude. It may ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... second to do so—does not disprove the theory of transposition by a fourth. In the first place, a considerable variety of pitches is no doubt represented in both groups since a universal pitch standard did not exist in the 16th and 17th centuries. Also, a margin of error of only a semitone is as good as could be expected considering the small number of examples on which ...
— Italian Harpsichord-Building in the 16th and 17th Centuries • John D. Shortridge |
