Morris's gestures and signals codified principles an individual improviser might pursue intuitively — repeating a phrase, harmonizing a melody, creating variations of a rhythm — but that an orchestra could not perform en masse unless its members possessed psychic abilities.
The singers have concise phrases, harmonized or dissonant or overlapping, that make nearly all of the libretto intelligible; they allude to the chromaticism of 12-tone music and to the non-Western modes of gamelan music and ragas.
He became famous as the creator and expounder of "organic architecture," his phrase indicating buildings that harmonize both with their inhabitants and with their environment.
During the second act in a song called "Ode to the Gun," the weary but beautifully harmonizing warriors repeat the hard-nosed phrase "We believe in God/And we believe in thee," -- "thee," meaning the guns they shoulder.
Random words are isolated, harmonized, and sent in unexpected directions: the phrase "through the mall" floats up briefly into falsetto; the words "girlfriend" and "cousin" are sung in half time as Kelly dodges and lurches, warning those around him of his powers of attraction.
His poems about extinct species, with their spare, syncopated structure and unexpected phrases, at their best recall Ogden Nash, even Emily Dickinson, and they harmonize elegantly with Christopher Wormell's wood engravings.
I loved that in the grave, slow introduction to the first movement, each phrase began with a steely chord that lingered, then trailed off into a sighing harmonized melodic turn.
Phrases such as "I am mindfully present, calm and focused" and "I am pausing to harmonize my heart, mind and body" are affirming of mindful intention.
We cannot harmonize everything".
