"I have been to many summits," the European Commission president, José Manuel Barroso, said afterward, but Lisbon was more "intimate, informal" and "a real exchange about the priorities" instead of mere note-reading — and he gave credit to Mr. Obama.
But now that downtown has become one of the most desirable areas in the region, deserving of a whole book rather than a mere note, all that looks terribly shortsighted.
The relative success of the "Friedenstag" recording demonstrates something else about Strauss: his operas respond particularly well to vivid, decisive performances, readings that lift the music from mere note-spinning to something more vivid.
In poetry a metaphor may perform varied functions from the mere noting of a likeness to the evocation of a swarm of associations; it may exist as a minor beauty or it may be the central concept and controlling image of the poem.
The debt owed by Herodotus to Athenian tragedy, with its implacable trajectories from grandeur to abjection, has been much commented on by classicists, some of whom even attribute his evolution from a mere note-taker to a grand moralist of human affairs to the years spent in Athens, when he is said to have been a friend of Sophocles.
In this way, what had initially appeared to be a mere note-to-note plagiarism of Beethoven has eventually given way to a radically different continuation, one which invokes Schubert's own, idiosyncratic compositional style.
But enough about the sociological details, which are mere grace notes in "Good Rockin' Tonight: The Legacy of Sun Records".
A former European Commissioner who is planning to run for the presidency, Emma Bonino (at 58, a mere babe), notes that a stagnant economy increases intolerance towards new entrants.
Their first task is to accept the constraints of their medium, the limitations of paint or the mere 12 notes of the scale.
