Something to hum

Usage examples of melody.

The rhythm of alternating dawn and sunset, the strophe and antistrophe still perceptible through all the sudden shifts of our dithyrambic seasons and echoed in corresponding floral harmonies, made melody in the soul of Abel, the plain serving-man.

Gellor left off the runs and rills, playing instead a melody and singing a ballad that bespoke the comradery and gladness of a forest camp at the coming of night.

What chiefly lives in it are certain poignant phrases, certain eloquent bars, a glowing, winey bit of color here, a velvety phrase for the oboe or the clarinet, a sharp, brassy, pricking horn-call, a dreamy, wandering melody for the voice there.

For each of these sub-spaces, and for each melody, we can define a flow of motion in a hypothetical cortical map that represents the subspace.

But though her instinctive belief in the universality of melody and harmony had convinced her that a devout witch could find a place in a program that used as its source material the monodic compositions of the Catholic Church, she simply could not see herself singing the praises of a God whose Church had, in the course of three or four centuries, overseen the slaughter of nine million of her kind.

The monody and empyrical tonality of the ancients gave place to polyphony and harmonized melodies resting upon the relations of tones in key.

Celtic singers and harpers was one of the most important of all the forces operative in the transformation of the art from the monody of the ancients to the expressive melody and rich harmony of modern music.

They at any rate perceived that the vital fact concerning the new monophonic style was that the melody alone demanded individual independence, while the other parts could not, as in polyphony, ask for equal suffrage, but must sink themselves in the solid and concrete structure of the supporting chord.

And then--then, when, poring over forbidden pages, I felt a forbidden spirit enkindling within me--would Morella place her cold hand upon my own, and rake up from the ashes of a dead philosophy some low, singular words, whose strange meaning burned themselves in upon my memory--and then hour after hour would I linger by her side and dwell upon the music of her voice--until, at length, its melody was tainted with terror--and fell like a shadow upon my soul--and I grew pale, and shuddered inwardly at those too unearthly tones.

The Mazurs are musically a highly gifted nation, and Chopin was impressed early in life with the quaint originality of their melodies.

One evening, camped at the edge of a deep wood, Tristran heard something he had never heard before: a beautiful melody, plangent and strange.

It was the melody Canon Tallis had whistled for Poly at the Hotel Plaza.

I awoke them from preconsciousness and released them to the light as crude melodies.

Meanwhile, almost giddy with anticipation and precursive spasms of sensation, Melody clung on to the phone and to the wall beside her for support.

Sitting amid the shrouds and rattlins, in the tranquillity of the moonlight, churming an inarticulate melody, he seemed almost apparitional, suggesting dim reminiscences of him who shot the albatross.