Musical expression, that element of musical performance which is something more than mere notes.
He grabbed the set with a series of huge forehands, mere notes in a symphony of grunts and groundstrokes.
"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.
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.
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.
Of course, the mere mention of the Note 7 and travel in the same sentence brings to mind some other potentially troubling scenarios.
"Subprime is a mere symptom," says Mr Ferguson, noting that many of the students he has taught in the "best universities in the world, including MBA programmes, don't even know the difference between the nominal and real interest rate".
