They're the very first sign of something else, the Candlemas bells, an undeniable signal that the warm days will come again; and I'm sure they fill me with elation because what I am looking at, against the dead tones of the winter earth, is Hope, suddenly and unmistakably manifest in white.
When you strike the notes (with the same hand as is providing the mute), you should hear the tone of the note, but with a subdued, dead quality.
It's this state of affairs that had Factory's Tony Wilson using a recent New York New Music Seminar panel discussion to plug his own band and wind up the yanks: Wake up America, you're dead, sed Tone.
In addition, Mr. Masur conducts Rachmaninoff's "Isle of the Dead," a tone poem based on a painting by Arnold Bocklin, and the evocative "Four Sea Interludes" from Britten's "Peter Grimes".
One odd guest is Lana Del Rey, whose dead debutante tones provide a strange but valid contrast to Womack's gargle on Dayglo Reflection.
Indeed, there's no greater scrambler of comedic intention that the Internet, which, with its dead-fish tone, can saddle comments that might have been breezy and glib when spoken ("You're insane!") with 700 pounds of unintended gravity ("You're insane") when written.
