Word: plainsong
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Most of the pieces Byrd wrote for the viol consort were based on a plainsong theme, supported by contrapuntal figurations by the accompanying instruments. Though the bare-bones outline of the form itself is admittedly simple, those who simply dismiss Byrd's mantric writing as constricting or stultifying miss the point...
Verghese makes indelible narratives of his cases, and they read like wrenching short stories told in Bobbie Ann Mason plainsong. Take Will Johnson, say, the dignified pillar of his church and his community, who contracts AIDS through a blood transfusion and then passes it on to his devoted wife, the two of them ending up frightened and alone in a huge medical center, reading The Magic Mountain to each other. Or Vickie, the chattery, brawling woman from the trailer park who gets infected by her husband and comes at last to feel that AIDS has given her a purpose...
Gregorian -- more properly known as plainchant or plainsong -- first surfaced as a popular phenomenon last year in Spain, where a two-disc version of Chant sold 325,000 copies in four months. The Benedictines' run-down 8th century abbey in northern Spain became a Mecca for music lovers, who came in throngs to hear the monks chant their communal prayers seven times a day. All this attention has flummoxed the abbey's 36 residents. "You have to understand," said one, "we are not rock stars...
...pernicious lure of stardom, whether biblical, political or intellectual. His lyrics mix roguish wit (Bangkok contains the unlikely couplet "Tea, girls--warm and sweet--warm, sweet/ Some are set up in the Somerset Maugham suite") with the blistering bitterness of Evita. Andersson and Ulvaeus' score ransacks melodic styles from plainsong to Puccini to Gilbert and Sullivan to Richard Rodgers to Phil Spector to hip-hop, in a rock- symphonic synthesis ripe with sophistication and hummable tunes. The Shubert Organization's Bernard Jacobs, a man not easily given to rapture, says, "Very few scores prior to production have excited...
Geographically and artistically, this festival occupies the center. Most of its plays come straight from the regional-theater heartland, in which everyday characters, often from the Midwest middle class, respond to family crises in the plainsong cadences of naturalism. For these people communication is hard enough; eloquence would be a suspect luxury. You have to listen hard to catch both the humor and the despair in a mother's complaint on returning from the supermarket: "Why are modern groceries so heavy?" (from Lee Blessing's Independence, a mother-and-daughters drama that plays like Crimes of the Heart...