"Minor key" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... spend the evening with them. The daughter and the two magisters sang for us all the characteristic songs of Wermeland and Dalecarlia which they could remember, and I was more than ever charmed with the wild, simple, original character of the native melodies of Sweden. They are mostly in the minor key, and some of them might almost be called monotonous; yet it is monotony, or rather simplicity, in the notation, which sticks to the memory. The longings, the regrets, the fidelity, and the tenderness of the people, find an echo in these airs, which have ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... quiet brooded in the Cloistered House as in the home where mourning enjoined movement in a minor key. Hylda had not recovered wholly from the illness which had stricken her down on that day in London when she had sought news of David from Eglington, at such cost to her peace and health and happiness. Then had ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the old man, and so he had for me. He was very great at leading that peculiarly dirge-like wail at the huge Yorkshire funerals. I never could quite make out any words, but as a singularly effective and musical cadence in a minor key, it was no doubt a survival, as I once heard Canon Atkinson say, the famous vicar of Danby, my immediate neighbour on the moors. At last I attended Frank Hutchinson daily in his prolonged decay, and received his solemn blessing and commendation on my work; ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... favorable to thought and meditation. I have a liking for such days as these; they revive one's converse with one's self and make it possible to live the inner life; they are quiet and peaceful, like a song in a minor key. We are nothing but thought, but we feel our life to its very center. Our very sensations turn to reverie. It is a strange state of mind; it is like those silences in worship which are not the empty moments of devotion, but the full moments, ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... a return to an earlier stage (i.e. a first section ending in the same key in which it commenced). In most of his pieces Scarlatti modulates to the dominant; in minor, to the relative major. Some exceptions deserve mention. In the Breitkopf & Haertel collection, No. 26, in A major, passes to the minor key of the dominant; and No. 11, in C minor, modulates to the minor key of the dominant, but the section closes in the major key ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock
... speaks one suffering with a deadly hurt to the other: "Friend, when I am dead, bury me in my native France, with my cross of honor on my breast, and my musket in my hand, and lay my good sword by my side." Until this time the melody has been a slow and dirge-like stave in the minor key. The old soldier declares his belief that he will rise again from the clods when he hears the victorious tramp of his Emperor's squadrons passing over his grave, and the minor breaks into a weird setting of the "Marseillaise" in the major ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... vitality and energy in his small face and rodent features. His hair was black, and his thin mouth and chin clean-shaven. His eyes were small and very shrewd; his manner was humble. He had a monotonous inflection and rather chanted in a minor key than spoke. ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... tell what relation the recurrent cadences of those songs and their broken rhythms may bear to the antique modes. But I can listen, as long as musicians will perform, to those infinite repetitions, that insistent sounding of the minor key. It pleases me to fancy there a music come from far away—from unknown river gorges, from camp-fires glimmering on great plains. Does not such darkness breathe through it, such melancholy, such haunting ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... of wholesome counsel in this matter is—Be sure that you use the joys which God does give. Many good people seem to think that it is somehow devout and becoming to pitch most of their songs in a minor key, and to be habitually talking about trials and disappointments, and 'a desert land,' and 'Brief life is here our portion,' and so on, and so on. There are two ways in which you can look at the world and at everything that befalls you. There is enough in everybody's ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... never feel sad, at such a time? Is not the whole of life, past, present, and to come, then tinged with sombre hues? and all because the dying day expires with such beauty and peace. Not so when a storm suddenly brings in night upon us. Then we are nerved and braced; we hear no minor key in the voice of the departing day. It is perfectly natural, therefore, to weep over our dead, even when every thing in their departure is consolatory and beautiful. It is interesting to observe that it was even when he was on his way to raise ...
— Catharine • Nehemiah Adams
... long my contemplation lasted. The woods were still. Save for a swarm of gnats which hummed in a minor key around the sleeping Lampron, nothing stirred, not a leaf even. All nature was silent as it ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin
... the keynote of the old melancholy Indian music; the bass, whose undertone accompanies, with a kind of monotonous solemnity, all the treble variations in the minor key. The world is unreal, a delusion and a snare; sense is deception, happiness a dream; nothing has true being, is absolute, but virtue, the sole reality; that which most emphatically IS,[4] attainable only through knowledge, the great illuminator, the awakener to the perception ...
— Bubbles of the Foam • Unknown
... this is the "Valse," Op. 34, No. 2. This is in a minor key and instead of representing the abandon of the dance, it seems rather to depict a melancholy lover allowing his eyes to travel slowly around the ballroom in a futile search of his heart's desire. The prevailing tone of the composition rather is that of an elegy—the burial ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... don't ask for me Enquiring how a Flossie should be won - There isn't any Rule Book, are you on? And Queenie can't be coaxed by recipee. Some girls like hard-luck music, minor key, Some like the Gas-car Gussie act, hot ton, Others are simply fierce for Jolly John Who loves to ...
— The Love Sonnets of a Car Conductor • Wallace Irwin
... celebrate, in a minor key, indefinite and melancholy symbols of fancy, is a snare than which none more dangerous can be placed in the path of a feeble foot. But Poe was not feeble, and he was protected, and permanent value was secured for ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... hoarse cough is heard, and around the hearth the children gather closely, no longer sporting amid the flowers, or peopling the cloughs with fairy homes. A dispiriting hand tones down the great orchestra of Nature, and all her music is set to a minor key, her 'Jubilate' becoming a ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... for. He was a tall, gaunt, sallow man of about thirty, with small gray eyes, a fine, falsetto voice, pitched in the minor key, and his speech the rude dialect of the mountains. His face had as many expressions as could be found in a regiment, and he seemed a strange combination of cunning, simplicity, undaunted courage, and undoubting faith; yet, though he might pass for a simpleton, he talked a quaint sort ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... struck Miss Verity as only tasteful and tactful that her approach to the distracted dwelling should take place unheralded by rumble of wheels or beat of horse-hoofs, should be pitched in a, so to speak, strictly modest and minor key. On arriving at the front gate she therefore alighted and, bidding her grumpy and streaming flyman take himself and his frousty landau to the Bell and Horns in Deadham village there to await her further orders, proceeded to walk up the carriage-drive ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... the monster in a minor key, and telling him that he may tear his bosom, but cannot touch his heart, he attacks him in the relative major, and ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... subject is one in itself almost incapable of color, and although, in order to increase the wildness of the impression, all brilliant local color has been refused even where it might easily have been introduced, as in the figures; yet in the low minor key which has been chosen, the melodies of color have been elaborated to the utmost possible pitch, so as to become a leading, instead of a subordinate, element in the composition; the subdued warm hues of the granite promontories, the dull stone color of the walls of the ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... which followed aroused me, and I soon busied myself in tracing the changes from major to minor, and from one minor key to another, as sorrows chase each other in life. Just at this part of the composition occurs the passage which sounds like a weird, ghostly call or summons: when I heard it, my fancy began working, and, like Heine, I saw spectres in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... the fault was his own; though he would have made mentally the gratifying reflection that never was a fault less deliberate. If, during the period of which I speak, his natural gayety had sunk to a minor key, a partial explanation may be found in the fact that he was deprived of the society of his late companion. It was an odd circumstance that the two young men had not met since Gordon's abrupt departure from Baden. Gordon went to Berlin, and shortly ...
— Confidence • Henry James
... pound, because, as he pretends, the farmers exhausted their supply of cattle in feeding the army for so long a time, and now find it more profitable to raise their lambs, and keep and shear their sheep, than to kill them. To which he adds a note in the minor key concerning the price of gold, and the increased expenses of living, which he has himself to meet, and drives us in despair to the pitiless merchant of whom we buy our dry-goods. He evidently expects Mr. Smith, for he says, with a shameless frankness ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... are mighty bad and some are wounded slight, And some will see their threescore years and some won't last the night, But the Red Cross train takes up the strain all in a minor key And sings Boulogne and Blighty as she ...
— "Crumps", The Plain Story of a Canadian Who Went • Louis Keene
... conscious of drinking it, vaguely conscious that he was winning. Soon the office had regained its ordinary appearance, his pulse was beating more regularly. He had once more the feeling of living—of living, though in a minor key. ...
— The Pawns Count • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... nearness to him now with her long braids of golden hair, the graceful sweep of her blue-feathered wings that matched the blue of her eyes, her red lips parted in song—but whatever it was, Mercer thought he had never heard so sweet a voice. She sang a weird little song. It was in a minor key, with curious cadences that died away and ended nowhere—the folk song of a different race, a different planet, yet vibrant with the ever unsatisfied longing of the ...
— The Fire People • Ray Cummings
... was weedy, his beard was long, And weedy and long was he, And I heard this wight on the shore recite, In a singular minor key: ...
— Fifty Bab Ballads • William S. Gilbert
... walked on slowly toward the house. As he approached, he heard someone playing the piano, and the music accorded well with his mood, or his mood with the music, for it was haunting, and very sweet, and with a recurring melody in a minor key, that seemed to voice all the sorrow of Humanity, ...
— The Money Moon - A Romance • Jeffery Farnol
... purified and spiritualized. Selfishness is decreased and compassion expands. Sympathy for others in distress is born, and thus a decided evolutionary advance is made. We have only to reflect upon the fact that separation without death produces the same effects in a minor key, to realize the evolutionary value of death. In constant association we grow careless and indifferent. But an absence of a month or two enables one to get a truer perspective of personal associations and thereafter life has new zest. A child regards its mother with a certain degree of appreciation ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... can scarcely think that, sir. They seem to have had only the minor key, and to have known no more of counterpoint than ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... opera—to that tragedy of the weakness of the flesh, albeit the spirit may be willing to listen to good. Alas! that the flesh should be so full of color and charm and seduction, while the spirit is pale, colorless, and set to music in a minor key! ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... minim, crotchet, quaver; semiquaver, demisemiquaver, hemidemisemiquaver; sustained note, drone, burden. tonic; key note, leading note, fundamental note; supertonic[obs3], mediant[obs3], dominant; submediant[obs3], subdominant[obs3]; octave, tetrachord[obs3]; major key, minor key, major scale, minor scale, major mode, minor mode; passage, phrase. concord, harmony; emmeleia[obs3]; unison, unisonance[obs3]; chime, homophony; euphony, euphonism[obs3]; tonality; consonance; consent; part. [Science of harmony] harmony, harmonics; thorough-bass, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... to the piano. It indicated how fully she had realized her part that, as she passed the mirror, no involuntary start testified to surprise at the aged figure it reflected. She played in a minor key an air to the words of Tennyson's matchless piece of ...
— The Old Folks' Party - 1898 • Edward Bellamy |
