And Julia Peyton-Jones, the director of the Serpentine Gallery in London, posed for the Royal Academy of Arts's magazine in a somber black shift and Crayola-bright sneakers.
Much of Williams' singularity and heartbreak resonated in his voice, which could shift from somber to what Crowell called a "post-vaudeville yodel" that tested singers who tried to emulate him.
Written in 2002, during a period in which Ms. Gosfield suffered from vertigo, her score incorporates microtones, glissandos and slashing gestures, shifting between somber and raucous moods.
The crowd, still feeling bruised over the drubbing Democrats took in the midterms, seemed eager to see him, but grew more somber as the president shifted into a discussion of his day with the Republican governor, and recounted the story of Miami Central.
He followed this with an in-the-pocket groove, syncopating open fifths with his left hand; another gospelish piece, silvery and sure; a devastatingly pretty miniature suffused with dreamlike tremolos; and a ballad of somber beauty, its harmony shifting like a cloud formation.
Guitry's character, for example, instinctively imagines himself as Francis I, the revolutionary Paul Barras and Napoleon III; when the film shifts into a somber, tragic tone for the story of Mary, Queen of Scots, we discover after the fact that it's because the dreamily romantic Delubac has been imagining herself in the role as she listens.
Like Boylan herself, Long Black Veil is hard to pin down: It's nominally a thriller, but it's character-driven like literary fiction; it deals with somber themes like murder and shifting identity, but it's suffused with comic moments; it features an ensemble cast yet extends Boylan's exploration of the deepest recesses of trans experience.
Even so, there was nothing kitschy about the somber image, which gradually began to shift as the dancers leaned and swayed into one another.
The music sounds rich and full of life, part Country, part Americana, with somber ballads and friskier romps that shift through melancholy to contemplative, to courtship and others that can still sting.
Like "Offertorium," Ms. Gubaidulina's first violin concerto, "In Tempus Praesens" unfolds in a continuous stream just over a half-hour long, permeated with somber silences and prone to unpredictable shifts from fragility to eruptive violence without warning.
