"Unmusical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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
... trains, and the slower freight trains for those 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 animal; no one fears it, and ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... the end of 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 the peculiar ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... was strong, 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 tone, ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor
... words in a not unmusical tone, but what they were intended to express it was impossible to say, nor could we be certain that he had mentioned his own name; but, as may be supposed, Paddy at once dubbed him Pullingo, which cognomen he was ...
— Twice Lost • W.H.G. Kingston
... gentle muse from such grand surroundings. I don't believe there is a piano in the country except at the girls' school at Cetinje. The Scotchman had suggested the gusla as a substitute, and had been met with derisive laughter, for he had made the suggestion in all good faith. He was one of the most unmusical men I have ever met. The professor had followed this up with a learned discourse on the gusla, and the lesson to be learnt from it in the origin and development of modern music, when suddenly the sounds of a violin, being ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... violinist Wieniawsky, as will be well remembered. 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 invested the piano with orchestral effects, and again transformed it ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... Appleton followed the unfeeling, unmusical, penurious old ladies and gentlemen back into the lounge, glaring at them as belligerently and offensively as a gentleman could and maintain his self-respect. Then he went into the waiting-room and embarked upon a positive orgy of letter-writing. Looking up from the last of his pile a half-hour ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... and a change of scene. Nor is there any means of escape within the precincts of the city itself from the eternal cracking of whips, from the insulting compliments (or complimentary insults) of the incorrigible cabmen, from the continuous babel of unmusical voices, and from the reiterated strains of "Santa Lucia" or "Margari" howled from raucous throats or strummed from rickety street-organs. Oh for peace, and rest, and a whiff of pure country air! For there are no walks in or around the City of the Siren, where there is nowhere ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... creeping into a shell of my own. To any one who has been accustomed in travelling, to be addressed with, "Do sit here, you will find it more comfortable," the "You must go there, I made for this place first," sounds very unmusical. ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... 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 and ferocious ...
— The Radio Boys with the Revenue Guards • Gerald Breckenridge
... Ordinarily it is a very quiet, demure sort of bird. It walks about over the leaves, moving its head like a little hen; then perches on a limb a few feet from the ground and sends forth its shrill, rather prosy, unmusical chant. Surely it is an ordinary, commonplace bird. But wait till the inspiration of its flight-song is upon it. What a change! Up it goes through the branches of the trees, leaping from limb to limb, faster and faster, till it shoots ...
— Bird Stories from Burroughs - Sketches of Bird Life Taken from the Works of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... only vegetable life that prospered. We had, indeed, few birds, and none that had much of a voice or anything worthy to be called a song. My morning comrade had a thin chirp, unmusical and monotonous, but friendly and pleasant to hear. He had but one rival: a fellow with an ostentatious cry of near an octave descending, not one note of which properly followed another. This is the only bird ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... all walk like cats) of a stern-looking red man, till a slender, dark hand was extended over my paper to grasp the dead bird from which I was copying, and which as rapidly transferred it to the side of the painted one, accompanying the act with the deep guttural note of approbation, the unmusical, savage "Owgh." ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... resolve themselves into something quite natural and generally not difficult of apprehension by a musical ear. Unfortunately we are compelled to learn music through the medium of a keyed instrument, generally through the most unmusical of instruments, the piano, and we learn theory largely through the eye and the reason instead of through the ear. The problems of harmony will seem much simpler if we remember that its basis is the interval—music does not ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... 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 virtuosos. For most of a virtuoso's love and ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... but a great deal is nothing more than dry recitative disguised. The first scene of the Rhinegold is purely symphonic: even if Alberich's spasmodic, jerky exclamations seem to be written in to fit the nature of this being, his whole mode of speech—harsh, unmusical—renders the fact less glaring; and the tide of music flows steadily on, reaching climax upon climax, until the final crash when he disappears with the gold. Wagner did not find it possible to ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... Theodore Watts that we, too, must look to give us the real Rossetti. It may be admitted at once that Mr. Watts's subject has for the moment been a little spoiled for him. Rude hands have touched it, and unmusical voices have made it sound almost common in our ears. Yet none the less is it for him to tell us of the marvel of this man whose art he has analysed with such exquisite insight, whose life he knows as no one else can know it, ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... so frequent and ear-piercing that he became famous for them, and many times in working on the ropes in rough seas and big winds, we have been cheered by this unmusical noise over our heads. ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... hat were getting up the canon's side among the cactus, the little horse climbing the trail shrewdly with his light-weight rider; and dusty, unmusical Genesmere and sullen Lolita watched them till they went behind a bend, and nothing remained but the tin-pan song singing in Genesmere's brain. The gadfly had stung more poisonously than he knew, and still Lolita and Genesmere ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... this singing—not that this is to be considered a compliment to the voices of Nort, Dick and Bud, though their tones were far from unmusical. But the fact is that animals of most sorts are fond of music in any form, and nothing so seems to soothe and quiet a bunch of cattle, especially at night, as the singing of ...
— The Boy Ranchers in Camp - or The Water Fight at Diamond X • Willard F. Baker
... shore and rowing or sculling toward her with almost indecorous rapidity. Lean over the rail for a minute with me, and watch the freight being unloaded into one of these bobbing little craft. The hatch of the steamer is opened, a most unmusical winch commences operations—and a sewing machine emerges de profundis. This is swung giddily out over the sea by the crane and dropped on the thwarts of the waiting punt. One shudders to think of the probably fatal shock received by the vertebrae of that machine. One's sympathies, however, ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... 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. The manufactured silk, the ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... has been wasted in trying to teach music to unmusical people would pay our national debt twice over, and leave a competency for ...
— An Ambitious Man • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... patience is required for such an affair as putting them in order, but having once summoned it to our aid we must persevere, or the matter would never be completed. My papers, both musical and unmusical, are nearly arranged at last; it was like one of ...
— Beethoven's Letters 1790-1826 Vol. 2 • Lady Wallace
... 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 ...
— Handel • Edward J. Dent
... babies, 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 ...
— A Modern Cinderella • Amanda M. Douglas
... truly he must have closely resembled a starved sweep on a wet day, while Disraeli declares his voice was as unmusical as the sound of a broken tin whistle. Of him Lecky writes:—"Richard Lalor Shiel forms one of the many examples history presents of splendid oratorical powers clogged by insuperable natural defects. His person was diminutive ...
— The Young Priest's Keepsake • Michael Phelan
... 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 his return from the spirit ...
— The Penance of Magdalena & Other Tales of the California Missions • J. Smeaton Chase
... shoulders, created 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
... 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 dislikes—chiefly the ...
— The First Mate - The Story of a Strange Cruise • Harry Collingwood
... and waited in the silent depths of the pear until half an hour had passed. And then Tonia heard the high, untrue notes of his unmusical singing coming nearer and nearer; and she ran to the edge of the ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... 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 ...
— The Wrong Box • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... 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 in the heart of that vast ocean of greenery, ...
— The Strange Adventures of Eric Blackburn • Harry Collingwood
... all right—take Betty," 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, ...
— The Motor Girls Through New England - or, Held by the Gypsies • Margaret Penrose
... say of an unmusical voice; would you prefer the voice which is voluntarily or involuntarily out ...
— Lesser Hippias • Plato
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Scarlet Gown - being verses by a St. Andrews Man • R. F. Murray
... as the excerpt given shows, in dignity and weightiness, but neither there nor elsewhere has he any of the finer qualities of style, his rhythm being harsh and unmusical, ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... fortunate in the means he has at hand for carrying on his work. But knowledge of voice is no more evolved from one's inner consciousness than is knowledge of musical notation, or of the Greek alphabet; therefore, if regular teachers in the school permit singing which is unmusical and hurtful, it is chiefly because they are following the usual customs, and their ears have thereby become dulled, or it may be that even if the singing is unpleasant to them, that they do not know how to make it better. As before said, all energies ...
— The Child-Voice in Singing • Francis E. Howard
... and sweetly warbling, "The Rose that All are Praising." She is as far from it as Susan B. Anthony was when pushing her ballot into the box. And all the difference between the musical saint spilling the precious liquid and the unmusical saint offering her vote is, that the latter tried to kill several birds with one stone, and the ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... 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
... 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 ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... German woman is the index to the German character. It is one of the most horribly unmusical ...
— With Haig on the Somme • D. H. Parry
... feel quite one of the performers," said the Herr Professor genially. "It is a great pity that the English nation is so unmusical. Never mind! To-night you shall hear something—we have discovered a nest ...
— In a German Pension • Katherine Mansfield
... that reveals genuine poetic 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 artistic variety ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... minutes to eleven, and the last stroke of the clanky church-bell had just died away in a series of unmusical vibrations. The townspeople, in all the added importance of Sunday clothes, gathered in an ever-thickening knot about the gates, greeting one another before they passed on into the church. At that moment, there floated towards them ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III., July 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... we brought from Mourzuk are now nearly all gone—I have only eight or ten left. Friend Sidi Jalef Waled Sakertaf—how unmusical the name sounds!—will get little money from us, and must content himself with our baggage, if he will play the robber. For the cousin of a ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 1 • James Richardson
... A harsh grinding, unmusical as emery upon hollow bronze, rasped stutteringly in the head phones. Laboriously, falteringly, the grating was cleaved into clumsy dots and dashes of the Continental Code, under the quaking fingers of some obviously frightened and inexperienced operator. Were these the sounds ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... in eagerness or excitement uncontrollable, Angela stood intently listening. Over among the thickets across the pool the voice of an Indian girl was uplifted in some weird, uncanny song. The voice was shrill, yet not unmusical. The song was savage, yet not lacking some crude harmony. She could not see the singer, but she knew. Natzie's people had returned to the agency, accepting the olive branch that Plume had tendered them—Natzie ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... surpassed by any pianist who has visited these shores in recent years. His tone in chord playing, it is true, was often harsh, and this fault also appeared in his melodic delivery. But in both cases any unmusical effect was so greatly overbalanced by many rare and beautiful qualities of tone production, that it ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... 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 fierce and untamable. He was sorry for Jim, because, as he believed, it would be as easy to teach ...
— The Spirit of the Border - A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley • Zane Grey
... identified with him in every particular of his life. 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, middle-aged cheek. ...
— The Rector • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... Harvard, had been learning the textile industry, of Miss Ottway, and Janet. Miss Ottway was the agent's private stenographer, a strongly built, capable woman with immense reserves seemingly inexhaustible. She had a deep, masculine voice, not unmusical, the hint of a masculine moustache, a masculine manner of taking to any job that came to hand. Nerves were things unknown to her: she was granite, Janet tempered steel. Janet was the second stenographer, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... 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
... 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 ...
— 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
... has often been 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 ...
— Piano Mastery - Talks with Master Pianists and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... bold baron," said the friar; but the friar was warm with canary, and in his singing vein; and he could not go on in plain unmusical prose. He therefore sang ...
— Maid Marian • Thomas Love Peacock
... of seeming irregularities, of lines broken up by rapid dialogue or cut short by the gulp of voiceless passion, nor do we forget that Shakspeare wrote for the tongue and not the eye, but we do not believe he ever left an unmusical period. Especially is this true of passages where the lyrical sentiment predominates, and we beg Mr. White to reconsider ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... rough-and-ready yellow things, like the leg of a chair, which might serve equally well as a policeman's baton or a musical instrument. It had been given by one of the sailors to Timoa, who developed a wonderful capacity for drawing unmusical sounds out of it. The singing was now low and plaintive, anon loud and harsh—always wild, like the song of the savages. The two combined assisted the pipe in soothing William McCoy—at least so we may assume, because he had commanded the music, and lay in his bunk in the attitude ...
— The Lonely Island - The Refuge of the Mutineers • R.M. Ballantyne
... same sense of domesticated or semi-domesticated animals and fowls. How different the voice of the common duck or goose from that of the wild species, or of the tame dove from that of the turtle of the fields and groves! Where could the English house sparrow have acquired that unmusical voice but amid the sounds of hoofs and wheels, and the discords of the street? And the ordinary notes and calls of so many of the British birds, according to their biographers, are harsh and disagreeable; even the nightingale ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... 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 ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... 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 ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... once was 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 ...
— Love-Songs of Childhood • Eugene Field
... "Though unmusical, German is the most expressive of all languages," he observed when Von Bork had stopped from pure exhaustion. "Hullo! Hullo!" he added as he looked hard at the corner of a tracing before putting it in the box. "This ...
— His Last Bow - An Epilogue of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... one every Tuesday morning, with Leopold Ballman, were tiresome unmusical periods of diaphragm exercises and an entire tearing down and reconstruction process of the previous methods taught her. It was tedious, standing before the long gold-and-black pier glass in the front parlor, watching the tendinous rise and fall of her lower thorax when her ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... good, was, at all events, ample: two of the waiting-maids were extremely handsome—- with dark eyes and fine features, and their handkerchiefs put on very gracefully; but the voices of all the inhabitants of Bedous were cracked and hoarse, and so unmusical, that it was difficult to imagine oneself in the country ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... the cook stepped into view, and, making a trumpet of his two hands, sent across the water a long, weird, and not unmusical cry. The men at once began slowly to drift in the direction of the camp. There, when the tin plates had all been filled, and each had found a place to his liking, Orde addressed them. His manner was casual ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... 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 ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... 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 be easily ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... suppose that it was selected as the most poetical composition of all the scores that were submitted to the Committee. But, perhaps by its tenor, by its allusions to the fire, to Garrick, to Siddons, and to Sheridan, it was thought most applicable to the occasion, notwithstanding its being in parts unmusical, and in ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... young lady, the world will listen to you some day!" That was the beginning of her great ambition. That day she began to look for the time when the world would come to listen. Then followed weary days and weeks and months and years, weary with self-denials new to her and with painful struggling with unmusical pupils, for she needed bread; weary with heart-breaking strivings and failings in the practice of her art, but, worst of all, weary to heart-break with the patronage of the rich and flattering friends—how she loathed it—of whom Dr. Bulling was the ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... again in the course of ages someone sets to music the tune which is haunting millions of ears. It is caught up here and there, and repeated till the chorus is thundered out by a body of singers able to drown all discords, and to force the unmusical mass to listen to them.'[149] The word 'force' in the last sentence shows the transition. Undoubtedly force in the sense of physical and military force has had a great influence in the formation both of ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... intelligent Americans, had been adopted con amore, and, as it were, taken to her bosom by Miss Petrie. Her ears had taught themselves to feel that there could be no vitality in speech without it, and that all utterance unsustained by such tone was effeminate, vapid, useless, unpersuasive, unmusical,—and English. It was a complaint frequently made by her against her friends Caroline and Olivia that they debased their voices, and taught themselves the puling British mode of speech. "I do know the gentleman," said Wallachia;—and Lady Rowley shuddered. Could it ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... 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 ...
— The Renaissance of the Vocal Art • Edmund Myer
... 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; cacophonous; harsh &c. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... 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 ...
— Popular Lectures on Zoonomia - Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and Disease • Thomas Garnett
... he had worn it for some seasons without a change, and had been out in much rough weather. His dark eyes were relieved by no merry twinkle; then there were small bare patches (which were not over beautiful) on his neck; and his voice was exceedingly hoarse and unmusical. But notwithstanding all this, there was a certain quiet dignity, and an air of ripe wisdom about the old bird which much impressed our hero, and made him listen with respect to whatever words of wisdom fell from the blue beak, although ...
— What the Blackbird said - A story in four chirps • Mrs. Frederick Locker
... from satiety he has long and diligently inquired, and believes it to consist in the perpetual variation of the numbers, by which the ear is gratified and the attention awakened. The lines that are commonly thought rugged and unmusical, he conceives to have been written to temper the melodious luxury of the rest, or to express things by a proper cadence: for he scarcely finds a verse that has not this favourite beauty; he declares that he could shiver in a hot-house when ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... 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 he could secure the production ...
— The Loves of Great Composers • Gustav Kobb
... sounds far more pure, and is more satisfactory than when a feeling is affected through the crude, unskilful, and absurd use of the pedal, especially of the soft pedal of which we are now speaking. This affectation only gives one more proof of our unhealthy, stupid, and unmusical infancy in piano performances. A good-natured public, drummed up and brought together by patient persuasion and by urgent recommendations, of which virtuosos can obtain an abundance (for the tormented cities which they have visited ...
— Piano and Song - How to Teach, How to Learn, and How to Form a Judgment of - Musical Performances • Friedrich Wieck
... interminable distance, whilst in front of it there was a gentle declivity (up which I had clambered) terminating in the broad, level road leading to Worthing. Here, on this broad expanse of the Downs, was a fairyland of soft sea air, sunshine and rest—rest from mankind, from the shrill, unmusical voices of the crude and rude product of the County ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... why people who are fond of sport and animals enjoy races and dog shows. But the continued vogue of grand opera, and more especially of Wagner’s long-drawn-out compositions, among our restless, unmusical compatriots, ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... started, chatty, full of gossip and incident. She writes, October 30th: "A ballad-singer was this morning singing beneath my window in a strain most unmusical and melancholy. My own name caught my ear, and I sent Thomas out to buy the song. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... consciousness are fundamentally different from each other. Neither the children nor their parents nor their teachers burden themselves with the careful analysis of such actual mental qualities when the choice of a vocation is before them. They know that a boy who is completely unmusical must not become a musician, and that the child who cannot draw at all must not become a painter, just as on physical grounds a boy with very weak muscles is not fit to become a blacksmith. But as soon as the subtler differentiation is needed, the ...
— Psychology and Industrial Efficiency • Hugo Muensterberg
... like so many ghosts at play, until our nerves felt 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, it ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 6, June, 1891 • Various
... they have ever been—little inclined towards strangers, learned at last to look for her in the fields and upon the shore, and laughed in response, they knew not why, to the quick smiling of her eyes. She even learned to speak their unmusical but friendly Norman-Jersey French. There were at least a half-dozen fishermen who, for her, would have gone at night straight to the Witches' Rock in St. Clement's ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... cattivo ragazzo," said she. "You quite forgot about your poor Lucia and her horror of that dreadful gramophone. I had to exert all the calmness that Yoga has given me not to scream. But you were naughty with the gramophone over those musical chairs—unmusical chairs, as I said to Peppino, didn't I, caro?—taking it off and putting it on again so suddenly. Each time I thought it was the end. E pronta ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... acceptable, should rule us where the gift is something so precious as a word; and when we receive one from another people, gratitude, as well as sense of grace in the form of the gift itself, should make us watchful that it be not dimmed by the boorish breath of ignorance or cacophanized by unmusical voices. We therefore protest against a useful and tuneful noun-substantive, a native of France, the word bouquet, being maimed into boquet, a corruption as dissonant to the ear as were to the eye plucking ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... custom. Lubin was somewhere in the shrubbery, and, unaware that anyone was within hearing, was warbling lustily to himself. Austin immediately pricked up his ears, for he had had no idea that Lubin was a vocalist. Away he carolled blithely enough, in a rough but not unmusical voice, and Austin was just able to catch some of the words of the quaint old west-country ballad ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... commanding officer but the 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 horse with dash ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... no unmusical sound, Nor jars interpose, sacred friendship to grieve. For generous lovers let a corner be found, Where they in soft ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... to present to you, my lord and gentlemen of the jury," he began in a clear, though unmusical voice, "is one the like of which is but too often met with in this court. It is one in which we shall see unbounded trust met by treacherous deceit, in which we shall see countless benefactions rewarded by the basest ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... musicians marched along almost doubled over, and would lean in unison first to the right and then to the left, striking first one end, then the other of their instruments, which they held in the middle by a bejuco string from a hole made for the purpose. The note was not unmusical. Many of the men had their head-baskets on their backs, and one or two of them the palm-leaf rain-coat. I had never imagined that it was possible for human beings to advance as slowly as did these warriors; in respect of speed, our most dignified funerals ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox
... individuality of his own. While his flight is undulatory, the waviness is not so deeply and distinctly marked; nor does he sing a cheery cradle-song while swinging through the ether, although he often utters a series of unmusical chirps. One of the most pleasingly pensive sounds heard in my western rambles was the little coaxing call of this bird, whistled mostly by the female, I think. No doubt it is the tender love talk of a young wife or mother, which may account ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... animals would perish in the snow; and that if we would go back, he would 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 Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California • Brevet Col. J.C. Fremont
... evening about the music for to-day I had entirely forgotten the existence of this flute, but after we went to our room, Ned persisted in practicing on that unmusical instrument of his, and in searching in my trunk for a weapon of self defense, I found this, and it answered my purpose so well then, I ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... the things we had seen in our walks, or told again some story we had read; these childish compositions she would read over with us, correcting all faults of spelling, of grammar, of style, of cadence; a clumsy sentence would be read aloud, that we might hear how unmusical it sounded, an error in observation or expression pointed out. Then, as the letters recorded what we had seen the day before, the faculty of observation was drawn out and trained. "Oh, dear! I have nothing to say!" would come from a small child, hanging ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... While Emerson's verse is frequently unmusical, in his prose we often find passages like this instinct with ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... that had rung in her ears for the last two years in all phases of intensity, passion, tenderness, and anger; a voice upon whose modulations, rude and unmusical though they were, her heart and soul had hung in transport or anguish. But it was a chime that had rung its last peal to her senses as she entered the Carquinez Woods, and for the last week had been as dead ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... 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 carry during ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... composing in Wiesbaden. Four years later he came to Boston, writing, teaching, and giving occasional concerts. Thence he returned to New York, where he was called to the professorship of music at Columbia University. Princeton University has given him that unmusical degree, Mus. Doc. ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... 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 ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... full seven thousand pieces. In short, he plays every piece that he has ever heard. How almost godlike (it cannot be brought to human comparison) is this retentive, this perfect memory, as relating to all that is musical, or even unmusical, in sound! ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... accused of a poor—or no— ear for poetry, since the only definition of "harsh" in his Dictionary which is applicable here is "rough to the ear." As no specific lines from the poem are labelled "harsh," one is forced to conclude that the whole poem is unmusical to Johnson's ears—if "harsh" means only "rough to the ear." But the notes to Shakespeare make it perfectly clear that "harsh" often means something other than that. Sometimes a line is stigmatised ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... of minstrelsy revived his apprehensions of falling once more into the hands of the gay maskers from whom he had escaped, and he renewed his summons on the door of the smith's dwelling with a hurried, though faltering, hand. He was then appalled by the deep, yet not unmusical, voice of Henry Gow, who answered from within: "Who calls at this hour, and what is it ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... (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.
... second birthday, Bryce divined that his father was 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
... And now there arose, before the general work of fleecing the wether lambs had well commenced, a terrible discord, as of a brass band with broken bassoons, and trumpets all out of order, from the further end of the building,—a terrible noise of most unmusical music, such as Bartholomew Fair in its loudest days could hardly have known. At such a diapason one would have thought that the tender ears of May Fair and Belgravia would have been crushed and cracked and riven asunder; that female voices would ...
— Miss Mackenzie • Anthony Trollope
... old leather and damaged flock. It is true, that towards the close of their conversation he had uttered some sentiments that, for a moment, startled the Cavalier; but then he had uttered them in so unskilled and confused a manner, and with such an unmusical voice, that it reminded him, not unaptly, of a blacksmith stringing pearls, so coarse was the medium through which these fine things came. He ventured to console himself, however, by the reflection, that a man of such cool and determined bravery must be, despite external ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... 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, for I remembered ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... yes? You carry your meddling outside of your newspaper work, eh? I leave behind me an old wife in the morning and in the evening, presto! I find a young bride. Wonderful!—but wonderful!" He laughed an unmusical and mirthless laugh. ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... the difference we may observe in men's degrees of power! To you and me, and many another like us, many things are impossible which are quite easy to others. For those who are unmusical, to play on the flute; to read or write, for those who have not yet learned; is no easier than to make birds of women, or women of birds. From the dumb and lifeless egg Nature moulds her swarms of winged creatures, aided, ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... 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
... and rhythm in music have on the truly musical. That psychology comes in no one can deny. Many people—perhaps at present the very large majority of people—have their colour-music sense dormant. It has never been exercised. In the same way many people are unmusical—either wholly, by nature, or partly, for lack of experience. Even when Kandinsky's idea is universally understood there may be many who are not moved by his melody. For my part, something within me answered to Kandinsky's art the first time I met with it. There was no question of looking ...
— Concerning the Spiritual in Art • Wassily Kandinsky
... had been. The only change seemed to be that 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
... unforgettable moment for Francis Ledsam, who seemed by some curious 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 an epitome of sin, the knout ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... is another species of which the eggs are likely to be found in the present month. If a pair of these birds have a nest they betray the fact to the world by the unmusical clamour they make from ...
— A Bird Calendar for Northern India • Douglas Dewar
... 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 "Two Souls with but ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... deep and the French shrill. It may seem strange to think that I comment upon such a small matter as a locomotive whistle, but when one is in a foreign land, amid foreign scenes and sounds, a familiar sound is good to hear, even though it is as unmusical as a deep ...
— In the Flash Ranging Service - Observations of an American Soldier During His Service - With the A.E.F. in France • Edward Alva Trueblood
... and greater carelessness for polish, and for the charm of musical utterance, and watch the clear and spirit-stirring melodies of the older poets swept away by a deluge of half-metrical prose-run-mad, diffuse, unfinished, unmusical, to which any other metre than that in which it happens to have been written would have been equally appropriate, because all are equally inappropriate. Where men have nothing to sing, it is not of the slightest consequence how they ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... were duly distinguished, nor were the performers allowed to confuse one style of music with another. And the authority which determined and gave judgment, and punished the disobedient, was not expressed in a hiss, nor in the most unmusical shouts of the multitude, as in our days, nor in applause and clapping of hands. But the directors of public instruction insisted that the spectators should listen in silence to the end; and boys and their ...
— Laws • Plato
... 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 ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... was playing—very softly. Carolyn was a skilful manipulator of keyboards, and she had discovered that by carefully refraining from the use of certain keys—discreetly marked by postage stamps—she could produce a not unmusical effect of subdued harmony. This unquestionably added very much to the impression of a churchly atmosphere, carried out to the eye by the Christmas wreathing and twining of the heavy ropes of shining laurel ...
— On Christmas Day In The Evening • Grace Louise Smith Richmond
... a pleasant message may make an unmusical tongue!" said Fleda, as she and Hugh made their way up to ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... dusky clouds, and the great trees without, and the dismal perspective beyond, gradually became one with the darkness. Uncle Remus had thoughtfully placed a tin pan under a leak in the roof, and the drip-drip-drip of the water, as it fell in the resonant vessel, made a not unmusical ...
— Nights With Uncle Remus - Myths and Legends of the Old Plantation • Joel Chandler Harris
... and we submit the assertion that vitality is no exception to the treatment of the dead, amounts to that. We say, argument with such a man is worse than nothing; it would be fallacious as the Eolian experiment of whistling the most inspiriting jigs to an inanimate, and consequently unmusical, milestone, opposing a transatlantic thunder-storm with "a more paper than powder" "penny cracker," or setting an owl to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... this reply, which is certainly a very natural one. For thirty years the common Cigale and his unmusical friend the Cacan have thrust their society upon me. For two months every summer I have them under my eyes, and their voice in my ears. If I do not listen to them very willingly I observe them with considerable ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... 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, when it became ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... to which they uplift our spirits. When we first open Dante or Milton, we miss the flowers and the 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 glow a ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne |
