"Sonority" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Phileas Beauvisage had an agreeable sonority altogether in harmony with the leguminous curves of his face (of the color of a light yellow pumpkin), his solid back, and his broadly expanded chest. That voice, bass in volume, could soften to a baritone and utter, in the ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... us a high respect for a book language which few of us ever actually speak and not many of us even learn to write. That language, elaborately artificial though it may be, undoubtedly has merits. It shows a sonority and a stateliness that you must go to the Latin and the Golden Age to match; its "highly charged and heavy-shotted" periods, in Matthew Arnold's phrase, serve admirably the obscurantist purposes of ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... she sobbed. The guttural sonority with which she rolled the "r" in "cruel" made the epithet appear one of revolting barbarity. She fixed those ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... imagination and power, strongly Italian in color and cast. The eyes were exceedingly deep set, in cavernous sockets; they were large, and black, and full of a restless brilliance, a piercing quality which consoled the shy novice by not being stationary. Lastly, a voice of bell-like tone and sonority, a voice capable of expressing without effort every shade of emotion from rage and terror to the most sublime tenderness. I have never heard a voice so fitted for poetical effect, so purely imaginative, and yet, in its absence of rhetoric, so clear and various, as that of Gabriel Rossetti. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... find the theme reproduced by Tasso;[119] and it had doubtless been freely used by Shakspere's English predecessors and contemporaries. What he did was but to set the familiar theme to a rhetoric whose superb sonority must have left theirs tame, as it leaves Seneca's stilted in comparison. Marston did his best with it, in a play which may have been written before, though published ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... exquisite touch and feeling, shows a Repose in Egypt. Lucas Cranach's L'Amour is one of his Virgins transposed to the mythological key. We have barely indicated the richness of this collection, in which, of course, Rubens plays first fiddle—rather the full orchestra. And with what sonority ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... frantic dance with maniacal gestures, mad stamping, and somersaults of boneless clowns. Diana took part in the dance, howling too, and jumped to the very roof of the projectile. An inexplicable flapping of wings and cock-crows of singular sonority were heard. Five or six fowls flew about striking the walls ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... the bold speculator had sufficient power to make his way in politics and enough gratitude not to desert his wife. Couture, a man about forty-three years of age, half worn-out, did not redeem the unpleasant sonority of his name by birth; he said little of the ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... of the air in the resonance chambers of the human instrument, together with the induced vibrations of the instrument itself, which give tone its sonority, its reach, its color, and ...
— Resonance in Singing and Speaking • Thomas Fillebrown
... a little poetic sonority, would make the style impressive, and they would be more ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... know the fine effect of a large Swell. The French Cathedral organs were deprived of this tonal resonance in 1850, and Cavaille-Coll, by judicious overhauling, use of good materials, and by the addition of large Swells, transformed the sonority of these large instruments located in splendid positions above the grand west entrance doors of these ...
— The Recent Revolution in Organ Building - Being an Account of Modern Developments • George Laing Miller
... unimpaired. Turner's "Carthage" is nature transposed and wonderfully modified. Some of the passages of light and shade there—those of the balustrade—are fugues, and there his art is allied to Bach in sonority and beautiful combination. Turner knew that a branch hung across the sun looked at separately was black, but he painted it light to maintain the equipoise of atmosphere. In the novel the characters are the voice, the deeds are the orchestra. But the English novelist ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... into more and more perfect harmony, uniting upon the single note, breaking again into countless changing tones, only to yield once more to the single A, caught, dropped during an instant's pause, then caught again and held in long-drawn, jubilant sonority. ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... choristers. Putting his hand on a girl's shoulder, he moved her to the right or left as his taste dictated. Then retiring abruptly, he cried, 'Now then, up you go!' and immediately after thirty voices in one sonority sang: ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... of the chorus-singers in front of the orchestra is not necessary, the conductor must take care to send them away; since this large number of human bodies injures the sonority of the instruments. A symphony performed by an orchestra thus more or less stifled, loses much ...
— The Orchestral Conductor - Theory of His Art • Hector Berlioz
... could separate the melody of word and of thought from their dogmatic significance, enjoying the one whilst wholly rejecting the other. "On earth peace, good-will to men"—already that line was among the treasures of his intellect, but only, no doubt, because of its rhythm, its sonority. Life, to him, was a half-conscious striving for the harmonic in thought and speech—and through what a tumult of unmelodious circumstance was he beginning to fight ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... tone was varied by changing the keys or register just as on the organ. On the other hand, with the piano one can vary the sonority by augmenting or diminishing the force of the attack, hence its original name of "forte piano,"—a name too long, which was shortened at first by suppressing the last syllables; so that one reads, not without astonishment, in the accounts given of young Mozart, ...
— On the Execution of Music, and Principally of Ancient Music • Camille Saint-Saens
... adventures with a most amusing accent and intonation. The Rabelaisian expressions, which give such a peculiar flavour to the conversation of the 'people' in Southern France, rolled off his tongue with a sonority that could hardly have been excelled at Nimes or Tarascon. His swagger, his gestures, and his elocutionary power were amazing. He would stop walking, and, placing his stick—which he called his trique—under his arm, would speak in a tragic stage-whisper; then, ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker |
