"Dissonant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... numerous tests to which Tom was subjected in our presence, or by us, he invariably came off triumphant. Whether in deciding the pitch or component parts of chords the most difficult and dissonant; whether in repeating with correctness and precision any pieces, written or impromptu, played to him for the first and only time; whether in his improvisations, or performances of compositions by Thalberg, Gottschalk, ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... of Ceylon, like other savage beasts, hairy, and spotted with tufts of fur, filthy, shameless, weaponless (though warlike in their individual bent), tool-less, houseless, language-less, except for a few guttural sounds, hideously dissonant, whereby they held some rudest kind of communication among themselves. They lacked both memory and foresight, and were wholly destitute of government, social institutions, or law or rulership of any description, except the immediate tyranny of the strongest; radically ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... tones giving rise to the feeling of incompleteness or unrest, and therefore requiring resolution to some other combination which has an agreeable or final feeling. (cf. consonance.) The diminished triad C—E[flat]—G[flat] is an example of a dissonant chord. ...
— Music Notation and Terminology • Karl W. Gehrkens
... when the dictator on the other side, having attacked their reserve and second line, threw his victorious troops, both horse and foot, in the way of the enemy as they turned themselves about to the dissonant shouts and the various sudden assaults. Thus surrounded on every side, they would to a man have suffered the punishment due to their reassumption of hostilities, had not Vectius Messius, a Volscian, a man more ennobled by his deeds than his ...
— The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius
... superstitious fear of death which is so common and one would think it was the very occasion to do it; he never once asked that we might be led to look upon it rationally and calmly. It's so unreasonable, Mr. Stackpole it is so dissonant with our views of a benevolent Supreme Being as if it could be according to his will that his creatures should live lives of tormenting themselves it so shows a want of trust ...
— Queechy, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell
... Flooding the night—and maidens of romance To whom asleep St. Agnes' love-dreams come— Awhile constrained me to a sweet duresse And thraldom, lapping me in high content, Soft as the bondage of white amorous arms. And then a third voice, long unheeded—held Claustral and cold, and dissonant and tame— Found me at last with ears to hear. It sang Of lowly sorrows and familiar joys, Of simple manhood, artless womanhood, And childhood fragrant as the limpid morn; And from the homely matter nigh at hand Ascending and dilating, it disclosed Spaces and avenues, calm heights and ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... and seams in its gray walls—traces of convulsion and revolution. Proud as it is, its very splendor shows the marks of a barbarous age. Its tapestry speaks a language dissonant to the ears of freemen. It tells of exclusive privileges, of divine rights, not in the people, but in the king, of primogeniture, of conformities, of prescriptions, of serfs and lords, of attainder that dries up like a leprosy the fountains of inheritable blood; ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... watched intently as he proceeded to manipulate a series of polished rods and levers. Suddenly the loud, humming note separated into two distinct tones, at first in musical accord and then becoming more and more dissonant. The revolving disk slowed down and stopped, and with it the dynamo came finally to rest. The hour of worship had come to an end; the Shining One had ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... the hounds, unleashed, lifted frantic voices. The very sky seemed full of the discordant tumult; wood and shore reverberated with the volume of convulsive and dissonant baying. ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers
... by itself have suggested (if the hundred positive proofs had not been extant) that the word "aches" was then ad libitum, a dissyllable—aitches. For read it "aches," in this sentence, and I would challenge you to find any period in Shakespeare's writings with the same musical or, rather dissonant, notation. Try the one, and then the other, by your ear, reading the sentence aloud, first with the word as a dissyllable and then as a monosyllable, and you will ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... dignity of the finer passages have the stamp of his ripest and tenderest genius on every line and in every cadence. But for sheer bewildering incongruity there is no play known to me which can be compared with "The Mayor of Queenborough." Here again we find a note so dissonant and discordant in the lighter parts of the dramatic concert that we seem at once to recognize the harsher and hoarser instrument of Rowley. The farce is even more extravagantly and preposterously mistimed and misplaced than that which disfigures the play just mentioned: but I ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... to the softer call of the slaty-headed species. The monotonous tonk-tonk-tonk of the coppersmith and the kutur-kutur-kutur of the green barbet are no more heard; in their stead the curious calls of the great Himalayan barbet resound among the hills. The dissonant voices of the seven sisters no longer issue from the thicket; their place is taken by the weird but less unpleasant calls of the Himalayan streaked laughing-thrushes. Even the sounds of the night are different. The chuckles and cackles of the spotted owlets no longer fill the ...
— Birds of the Indian Hills • Douglas Dewar
... cacophony, want of harmony, caterwauling; 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; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... rose about them, a dissonant mingled merry outcry, made into a level roaring sound by their height ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... How many dissonant bells jangled to their touch; how many dreary hallways they entered and stood waiting in; how many steep staircases they climbed; how many rooms they peeped into—one look enough; how many others they viewed at greater length, but with no more ...
— Old Valentines - A Love Story • Munson Aldrich Havens
... only till the dawn of day. While the trumpets sounded to arms, the undaunted courage of the Goths was confirmed by the mutual obligation of a solemn oath; and as they advanced to meet the enemy, the rude songs, which celebrated the glory of their forefathers, were mingled with their fierce and dissonant outcries, and opposed to the artificial harmony of the Roman shout. Some military skill was displayed by Fritigern to gain the advantage of a commanding eminence; but the bloody conflict, which began and ended with the light, was maintained on either side, by the personal and obstinate ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... of the Thoughts of the Greeks and Romans, shows no great Richness of Genius, in any kind of Poetry, in Pastoral 'tis much more to be avoided. If a Hero does sometimes talk out HOMER and VIRGIL, 'tis not so shocking, because tis not dissonant to Reason to suppose such a Person acquainted with Letters and Authors; nor is an Heroick Poems Essence Simplicity; But if a Modern gives me the Talk of a Shepherd, and I have seen it almost all before in THEOCRITUS, VIRGIL and SPENCER, ...
— A Full Enquiry into the Nature of the Pastoral (1717) • Thomas Purney
... advice and that of the Duke of Wellington, proffered for the last ten years. His lordship seemed ambitious of identifying himself with the illustrious duke on all possible occasions, although scarcely any two men could have entertained opinions more dissonant than ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... of the readers as were learned in the laws, finding not only gross errors and absurdities on law, but palpable mistakings in the very words of art, and the whole context of that rude and ragged style wholly dissonant (the subject being legal) from a lawyer's dialect, concluded that inimicus et iniquus homo superseminavit zizania in medio tritici, the other discreet and indifferent readers, out of sense and reason, found out the same conclusion, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 183, April 30, 1853 • Various
... nothing favourable can be said; the sentiments commonly want force, nature, or novelty; the diction is sometimes harsh and uncouth, the stanzas ill-constructed and unpleasant, and the rhymes dissonant, or unskilfully disposed, too distant from each other, or arranged with too little regard to established use, and, therefore, perplexing to the ear, which, in a short composition, has not time to grow familiar with ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... England is put to the triall of combat betweene Cnute and Edmund, Cnute is ouermatched, his woords to king Edmund, both kings are pacified and their armies accorded, the realme diuided betwixt Cnute and Edmund, king Edmund traitorouslie slaine, the dissonant report of writers touching the maners of his death, and both the kings dealing about the partition of the realme, Cnute causeth Edrike to be slaine for procuring king Edmunds death, wherein the reward of treason is noted; how long king Edmund ...
— Chronicles (1 of 6): The Historie of England (7 of 8) - The Seventh Boke of the Historie of England • Raphael Holinshed
... returning, the Parlement, in this state of continual explosion that shall cease neither night nor day, waits the issue. Awakened Paris once more inundates those outer courts; boils, in floods wilder than ever, through all avenues. Dissonant hubbub there is; jargon as of Babel, in the hour when they were first smitten (as here) with mutual unintelligibilty, and the ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... immense sombrero, the brim of which had been much cut and mutilated, so as in some places to resemble the jags or denticles of a saw. He returned the salutation of the orange-man, and bowing to me, forthwith produced two scented wash-balls which he offered for sale in a rough dissonant jargon, intended for Spanish, but which seemed more like the ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... life about the beginning of the reigne of king Henrie the second, certeine yeers before the bones of Arthur were found (as ye haue heard.) But omitting this point as needles to be controuerssed, & letting all dissonant opinions of writers passe, as a matter of no such moment that we should need to sticke therein as in a glewpot; we will proceed in the residue of such collections as we find necessarilie pertinent to the continuation ...
— Chronicles 1 (of 6): The Historie of England 5 (of 8) - The Fift Booke of the Historie of England. • Raphael Holinshed
... are often harsh and dissonant. Even in the noble poem Rabbi Ben Ezra, this jolting ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... Kelts of Galloway, guided by a tall spear, wreathed with heather blossom, and shouting, "Albin! Albin!" with harsh, dissonant cries like the roar of a tempest, fell headlong on the English ranks, and at first their fury carried them on so that they burst through them as if they had been a spider's web. But the Norman chivalry round the standard ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... chords among, May make mad discord of the sweetest song. E'en so with dissonant clamor through the breast Of Gawayne rang the Green Knight's merry jest; But what wild meaning must it not impart To the vague fears of gentle Elfinhart? For she had heard in the first trumpet-blast A signal to her from the far-gone past; ...
— Gawayne And The Green Knight - A Fairy Tale • Charlton Miner Lewis |
