dirgelike

At the opening notes of the melody--a slow, wailing, dirgelike air--the cats rose, and circled round their mistress, marching to the tune.

The lineup is always represented by a motley crew of designers mostly diverse, experimental in playing with shape as well as colours but also sometimes almost dirgelike in their grunginess.

On a less dirgelike note, Western classical music is in fact vigorous in some parts of the world, such as China.

The "Gala Xmas Number" (December 1962), dedicated to the "mass murderers" Kennedy and Khrushchev, announces the "First Annual Worlds [sic] Worst Poetry Contest"--pretty funny, in that Yeah published quite a few contenders, not least Kupferberg's travesty of Keats's 1820 "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "Ode on the Chinese Bomb": "Thou still unravished bomb of quietness!" In truth, Kupferberg would prove a better songwriter than poet ("Morning, Morning," from 1966, may be the only Fugs composition to merit the adjective lovely, and "Nothing," from the previous year, adapted from a monstrously ironic, dirgelike Yiddish paean to potatoes, is a masterpiece of Zen Judaism), but he was a marvelously dexterous mimeographer.

The next two songs were the dirgelike This Is Your Land and Soul Crying Out, a song that just wouldn't take off.

"[They're] almost dirgelike and plaintive," added the Jesuit who composed the entrance hymn "Laudate Dominum (Praise the Lord)" and communion song "Iesu, Panis Vitae/Tinapay ng Buhay."

So deeply scarred,/ So still with silent cries." Moving slowly in eighths, dirgelike and very soft, the piano stays in the bass clef with only a brief excursion into the treble clef with thick chords at the climax of the song, returning to the bass clef for the final lines.

This dirgelike vignette may become, for readers, a prototype of soul-fortifying rites to be performed for a newly-dead beloved.

Monk begins by playing a dirgelike piano ostinato that provides a sonic platform over which she ululates with ever-increasing dynamic intensity.

Even the mellower numbers like the blues smoker "Tears of Joy" and the dirgelike "Little Rock Star"--a hopeful ode to self-destructive rock stars everywhere--seem to portray this new perspective.

The slow dirgelike opening sets the mood, but it eventually opens up to a lovely, sunny middle section with vaguely Scottish, pastoral inflections.

In the dirgelike song--which features Earle's cigs-and-whiskey voice over sparse, guitar-driven instrumentation and is written in the first person--Earle's Walker hopes if he dies in service to Allah, "I'll rise up to the sky/Just like Jesus, peace be upon him." This is a character study, not an endorsement--sympathetic only in the sense that it examines what may have motivated a 20-year-old American guy to turn to Islam and jihad.