The delicate descriptions and words of A Hermit Thrush at Morn appealed to me as the words alone brought strong imagery to my head and tying that in with the music, I could feel the air on that summer day. The sweet imagery of John Clare’s poem is expressed in the musical elements of Amy Beach’s A Hermit Thrush at Morn. The hawthorn bush the mama thrush lives in is very protective and growing, just like her family. The mama thrush sings a cheery and high pitched song every day, and she was unaware of the human there observing her build her home (contributing to some of the more suspenseful chords). The music starts out very quiet, almost like waking up early, and builds pretty quickly just as the thrush begins her day. The twinkling …show more content…
and staccato notes mimic the thrush being a “busy bee” preparing for her future family. The slow moving bass was consistent as delicate notes darted in and out of the treble clef which made me imagine the thrush swooping around. After that repeated melody that happened in the middle, the music becomes very hectic kind of like a busy bird flying. Continuing, at minute three out of four, the same melody that happened in the beginning appears again. I interpreted that as a correlation with the beginning with the mama thrush flying around and then, at the end, the baby thrush’s flying around. At the end of the piece, the music gets loud and intense, then softly fades away. I interpreted the fading away of the piano as the baby thrush’s flying away from the nest. A broad theme found in the poetry is the theme of love. To back this theme up, phrases such as “watched her secret toil,” “how true she warped the moss” and made their home in a “thick and spreading hawthorn bush.” This goes to show the thrush’s protective side that comes with being a mother. Another common theme going along with motherhood is the thrush being a teacher. She has a “brood of nature’s minstrels” that “chirp and fly” just like her. After her baby’s hatch, they repeat her daily routine of singing when the sun comes up and fly around. Although there are many broad themes, the final one I am going to mention is the tranquil imagery found in both the poetry and music. By using harmony and words such as “I drank the sound” “like heath-bells gilt with dew” “and the laughing sky” and “as bright as flowers” the audience is once again reminded about the happy world the mama thrush is living in. The organization of the musical aspect of this piece started out quiet, like in the morning, and then builds and falls depending on what the thrush is doing.
Within the phrase structure, I could feel the pulse in beats of two beats per measure and the new phrases being recognized with a new melody. I could also feel a little bit of syncopation and polyrhythm at times when the treble clef was moving quickly with the base moving at a consistent tempo. There was ostinato at the beginning, middle, end which kind of relates to the phases of life. The texture I would describe as heterophony because of the simultaneous elaboration of the same melody. Looking at the musical score, each page has a different melody than the previous or next page. The shape of piece is uplifting and hopeful as the notes lie conjunct to each other along with having small intervals. The articulation is kind of staccato at the beginning then the notes all begin to mold together as the picture is painted. The music is very harmonious with a lot of consonance and a bit of dissonance so you can picture the busyness of the thrush. The cadence toward the end is the same staccato notes as the beginning, but got really soft and quiet really fast. The composer used very pure notes and mostly major chords. The dynamics start out soft in the beginning but the sound grows and falls as events happen. The music helps us picture the thrush singing her song with the piano notes are staccato, the tension in
the piano builds when the eggs hatch in anticipation, and then fades away in the end as the baby thrush’s fly away.
The timeline carries on chronologically, the intense imagery exaggerated to allow the poem to mimic childlike mannerisms. This, subjectively, lets the reader experience the adventure through the young speaker’s eyes. The personification of “sunset”, (5) “shutters”, (8) “shadows”, (19) and “lamplights” (10) makes the world appear alive and allows nothing to be a passing detail, very akin to a child’s imagination. The sunset, alive as it may seem, ordinarily depicts a euphemism for death, similar to the image of the “shutters closing like the eyelids”
In the beginning of “The Death of the Moth” Woolf describes ”a pleasant morning, mid-September, mild, benignant” (193), the usual autumn day, with regular work on the field, rooks on the tree tops that looked like “a vast net with thousands of black knots” (194). The picture is calm, but rooks, symbol of death, bring dark color to it. Gradually, with the development of the events, when death starts winning over moth’s struggle to live, the image changes, “work in the fields had stopped” (195). Like in the slow-motion picture, everything becomes stiff. Woolf uses words “still”, “indifferent”, “impersonal” to increase a sense of despair. Author uses such an imagery to empower the hopelessness of the moment and to make the reader feel the futility of the life and death struggle.
In reference to music we can indentify specific aspects of pitch, including harmony and melody. Harmony refers to the relationship of sounds that happen simultaneously while melody refers to the relationship between sounds that occur one right after the other. “Classical Gas” has a melody, which means it has a hummable tune accompanied by a wide pitch range. Some notes are leisurely and low, while others burst into rapid, loud sounds. “Cat’s in the Cradle” also has a melody, however, its pitch range is much narrower than “Classical Gas”. It does have high and low notes, but the high notes seem to mostly come during the chorus of the song, rather than randomly throughout the piece. “Classical Gas” is mostly presented in a conjunct, or stepwise motion, however, some leaps, or disjunct motions are prominent and repeated throughout the song. F...
In the stanzas of Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, the speaker very honestly observes the scenes from outside her apartment. From her point of view, she sees a both a bird and a dog in the process of sleeping. The speaker views these animals as having simple lives unbothered by endless questions or worries. Instead, the two live peaceful, uninterrupted existences, rising every morning knowing that “everything is answered” (ln. 22). However, the speaker lives in contrast to this statement instead anxiously awaiting the next day where uncertainty is a likely possibility. Unlike the dog and the bird, the speaker cannot sit passively by as the world continues in its cycle and she carries a variety of emotions, such as a sense of shame. It is evident here that the speaker has gone through or is currently undergoing some sort of struggle. When she states that “Yesterday brought to today so lightly!” she does so in longing for the world to recognize her for her issues by viewing the earth’s graces as so light of actions, and in doing so, she fails to recognize that she can no longer comprehend the beauty of nature that it offers her. In viewing the light hitting the trees as “gray light streaking each bare branch” (ln. 11), she only sees the monotony of the morning and condescends it to merely “another tree” (ln. 13.) To her, the morning is something
Throughout the first Vignette, the author utilizes diction in a well thought out way, choosing words like light, warm, and glittering to paint the image of another beautiful morning and create a serene mood. One can almost feel the hope the snails feel in the world with lines like “The land they had found themselves in had grown increasingly
The dynamic levels at the beginning were in piano, but it did not stay that way, there were changes in the sound there were crescendos and decrescendos but mostly toward the end. The harmony was very polyphonic it had many sounds play at one and the texture was also thick it had many layers of sounds because of the number of instruments and the variety of instruments playing simultaneously. The instruments played in this composition were strings, woodwind, brass, and percussion like, cello, flute, French horn, and timpani and they for the tone color the instruments did have a high pitch range. The form for this was theme and variation because he had a theme and variation he took the melody and used it over and over and over again by changing different elements. Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in G Minor, Op. 16 rhythm was a medium walking pace and the steady beat was recognizable. For dynamics, the composition started off mezzo and had changed where it was forte and had crescendos. The melody seemed to be in minor scale
This piece was definitely tonal. The listener has a sense of direction throughout the whole piece. The harmony was consonant because the chords were stable and there was very little tension. The mood throughout the piece was calm and loving. It had a bit of a slow tempo which is why the mood felt like it was calm and loving. The dynamics were from low to high. The pitch changes quickly in some parts while in others it stays around the same. Since the dynamics were tonal, there was no parts in it that will catch the listener completely off guard.
She describes the September morning as “mild, benignant, yet with a keener breath than the summer months.” She then goes on to describe the field outside her window, using word choice that is quite the opposite of words that would be used to describe a depressing story. She depicts the exact opposite of death, and creates a feeling of joy, happiness, and life to the world outside her room. After this, she goes into great detail about the “festivities” of the rooks among the treetops, and how they “soared round the treetops until it looked as if a vast net with thousands of black knots in it had been cast up into the air”. There is so much going on around her that “it was difficult to keep the eyes strictly turned upon the book.” Descriptions like these are no way to describe a seemingly depressing story about a moth, but by using these, joyful descriptions, Woolf connects everything happening outside to a single strand of energy. These images set a lively tone for the world around her, and now allow her to further introduce the moth into the story.
The texture is polyphonic. It has a slow tempo and there is no presence of accelerando or ritardando. Harmony is a consonant of the word. Melody is conjunct and peaceful. Has a lot of repetition.
During the 18th century, two great companions, William Wordsworth, collaborated together to create Lyrical Ballad, one of the greatest works of the Romantic period. The two major poems of Lyrical Ballad are Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” and Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight.” Even though these two poems contain different experiences of the two speakers, upon close reading of these poems, the similarities are found in their use of language, the tone, the use of illustrative imagery to fascinate the reader’s visual sense and the message to their loved ones. The speaker of “Lines Composed of a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” is Wordsworth himself. He represents Romanticism’s spiritual view of nature.
...re was very interesting transitions between the variation, for example, string section plays the variation from low to high, when they reach the highest note, the brass family takes over and continue with the scale and make it more higher. Tremolo style was used in this piece, which is a quick ups and downs stroke mode. The music were very soothing and attracted the audience. Lastly, they end the piece with the same variations that was played at the beginning.
In the first stanza, Wordsworth lets you know he is seeing the abbey for a second time by using phrases such as "again I hear," "again do I behold," and "again I see. He describes the natural landscape as unchanged and he describes it in descending order of importance beginning with with the 'lofty cliffs'; (Line 5) dominantly overlooking the abbey. After the cliffs comes the river, , then the forests, and hedgerows of the cottages that once surrounded the abbey but have since been abandoned. After the cottages, is the vagrant hermit who sits alone in his cave, perhaps symbolizing the effects being away from the abbey has had on Wordsworth. Wordsworth professes to "sensations sweet / Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart" (lines 28-29) which the memories of nature can inspire when he is lonely, just as the hermit is lonely.
...chestral introduction with an imperfect cadence. A strong rhythmic ¾ allegro passage, with sequences and descending scales is played by the orchestra, with timpani and cymbals. The music modulates, and a short, quiet woodwind passage is then alternated with an orchestral passage with dotted rhythms, creating a `terraced dynamics' effect. Part B begins with a major clarinet melody accompanied by pizzicato strings. A minor flute sequence follows, and is followed by a repetition of the oboe melody. A string sequence is then played, imitated by the oboe. There is a crescendo, then the rhythmic orchestral melody returns, alternated with a short flute passage. There are suspensions, descending scales and a crescendo, followed by a strong rhythmic passage with the timpani playing on the beat. Imperfect cadences are played, before the piece finishes with a perfect cadence.
Robert Frost is considered by many to be one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. Frost’s work has been regarded by many as unique. Frost’s poems mainly take place in nature, and it is through nature that he uses sense appealing-vocabulary to immerse the reader into the poem. In the poem, “Hardwood Groves”, Frost uses a Hardwood Tree that is losing its leaves as a symbol of life’s vicissitudes. “Frost recognizes that before things in life are raised up, they must fall down” (Bloom 22).
We all remember these grey gloomy days filled with a feeling of despair that saddens the heart from top to bottom. Even though, there may be joy in one’s heart, the atmosphere turns the soul cold and inert. Autumn is the nest of this particular type of days despite its hidden beauty. The sun seems foreign, and the nights are darker than usual enveloped by a thrill that generates chills to travel through the spine leaving you with a feeling of insecurity. Nevertheless, the thinnest of light will always shine through the deepest darkness; in fact, darkness amplifies the beauty and intensity of a sparkle. There I found myself trapped within the four walls of my house, all alone, surrounded by the viscosity of this type of day. I could hear some horrifying voices going through my mind led by unappealing suicidal thought. Boredom had me encaged, completely at its mercy. I needed to go far away, and escape from this morbid house which was wearing me down to the grave. Hope was purely what I was seeking in the middle of the city. Outside, the air was heavy. No beautifully rounded clouds, nor sunrays where available to be admired through the thick grey coat formed by the mist embedded in the streets. Though, I felt quite relieved to notice that I was not alone to feel that emptiness inside myself as I was trying to engage merchant who shown similar “symptoms” of my condition. The atmosphere definitely had a contagious effect spreading through the hearts of every pedestrian that day. Very quickly, what seemed to be comforting me at first, turned out to be deepening me in solitude. In the city park, walking ahead of me, I saw a little boy who had long hair attached with a black bandana.