More than anything, perhaps, readers love the delightful aural power of a young narrator.
Like many tradition-minded Jews, he was raised to hear the Torah sung aloud in synagogue every Sabbath, but it wasn't until he chanced upon a recording of Psalms and Ecclesiastes, as read by Abba Eban, the late Israeli diplomat, that Fox first grasped the aural power of ancient Hebrew.
If the physical endowments were suspect, Schipa managed to create natural beauty out of the pureness and sensitivity of his aural imagination; his spiritual faculties, in other words, seemed capable of exercising remarkably persuasive powers over the body.
But Max hardly has the field of sea-music to himself, so here are a few other orchestral pieces that come close, for me, to making an aural metaphor that approaches the power of the real thing.
But the Arab music (by Lewis Gibson, performed by an onstage band), which forms a subliminal aural backdrop to the modern power games, has the timeless, propulsive sound of centuries passing to a steady, ominous beat.
And this V-8 is hooked to a throaty exhaust, so the rush of power is also aural; you feel slightly bad (at least as bad as a soccer dad might want to).
Power is primarily an aural exhibition.
So, not surprisingly, some have tried to cash in on the healing powers of DNA music, selling aural doses of Ginkgo biloba and Echinacea genes, to help listeners "strengthen mind-body connections", according to one internet purveyor.Others contemplate a more hard-nosed approach.
But in allowing the production to unfold in accord with the rhythms of the prose work it was drawn from, with no attempt to decorate it with visual or aural effects, Mr. Brook kept a tight hold on its power to move us to think and to feel.
Or is this play on words – this combination of an aural figure and a syntactical one – yet another display of Richard's vast rhetorical power, the kind of power that can people an empty world, the kind of power that stands in so much contrast to Bolingbroke's terse and impatient statements and questions?
If you closed your eyes during Mr. Groban's concert, you could imagine that the pulsing bass and drums and acoustic string section amplified beyond recognition into a thick aural soup were not all that different from the sound of a power ballad by an '80s hair band.
