(a.) A piece of music of a mournful character, to accompany funeral rites; a funeral hymn.
Example Sentences:
(1) His wink-wink, nod-nod racist slogan, “Make America great again,” together with his apocalyptic dirge of a convention, left exposed and unguarded a flank that is usually the Republicans’ specialty.
(2) In some establishments, mournful dirges played while coffins were carried through the crowds of drinkers; in others, the walls were hung with black crepe.
(3) The band appear to be playing several verses of the English dirge.
(4) There is, it seems, a political divide in CBeebies appreciation, judging by a recent Spectator article entitled “ Agitprop for Toddlers ” in which the author compared a wildlife programme on the channel, in which “a rainbow nation of children [march] around the British countryside singing ‘Let’s make sure we recycle every day’”, to “one of those Dear Leader dirges you see in North Korea”.
(5) As Claudius said in Hamlet: “With mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage.” Weddings, to me, feel heavy with expectation, pregnant with emotion, saturated with hope, fear and hard-to-keep promises.
(6) This dirge of a ballad is performed by a woman whose facial expression befits someone burying their pet dog.
(7) Due to an editing error, the quote, “With mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage”, was misattributed to Hamlet.
(8) The dirge can be kept for British sport such as the Olympics, Andy Murray doing well and the ones where you sit down."
(9) Such legislation would be a royal pain the arse in the UK, our dirge leading to a spike in suicide rates around tea-time.
(10) Today I see England as a continuum, with football yobs at one end and Eton yobs at the other, and Morrissey dirging about lost seaside resorts somewhere in the middle.
(11) "That is the mother of all dirges, but I'm not too keen on Flower of Scotland either.
(12) Across the internet, thousands of music fans looking for Thicke's raunchy, cowbell-stoked summer jam stumbled instead on a recording of Beckwith's sombre dirge , released on the 2010 CD Jalsaghar .
(13) The Danish one is a bit of a dirge and should really only be used as the closing credits of a lunchtime documentary on some shortwave radio station.
(14) FIFA games aren’t exactly known for hilarity, so these shows are a very welcome change of tone from the brain-breaking Europop dirge found in EA’s club football game year after year.
(15) Japan's is bloody miserable, to tell the truth, the sort of dirge you'd expect to hear pinging off the walls of a church in the Outer Hebridies.
(16) These are the poems: "Burbank," "Gerontion," "Sweeney Among the Nightingales," "A Cooking Egg," and the posthumously published "Dirge".
(17) BECAUSE WHEN PEOPLE HEAR THE CAN-DO OPTIMISM OF THE YES CAMPAIGN UP AGAINST THE CAN’T-DO DIRGE OF THE NO CAMPAIGN THEN THEY CHOOSE YES.
(18) A Hague speech became a Foreign Office dirge, awash in wars on terror, wars on want, wars on rape and a world of “unacceptable” regimes.
(19) 9.49pm GMT “Six priests wailed an a cappella dirge as the open funeral casket was carried through the assembled throng and brought to the stage at Independence Square,” begins Shaun Walker’s (@ ShaunWalker7 ) dispatch from Kiev today: The body, wrapped in a white cloth with just the head visible, was that of just one of at least 77 people to have died this week in Kiev, but its arrival pricked thousands of eyes with tears, as the huge crowds that had gathered bowed their heads in prayer.
(20) There are certainly a good many less dirge-like than ours.
Threnody
Definition:
(n.) A song of lamentation; a threnode.
Example Sentences:
(1) A lament for the failed ideals of a group of 1960s Cambridge graduates who all too quickly swap their literary dreams for coffee table books and hack journalism, the play was an elegiac threnody for soiled friendship and a descent from intellectual rigour and seriousness to philistinism.
(2) And some of the detail of the piece is based on something that seems straight out of a sci-fi movie: Penderecki wired up psychiatric patients to encephalogram machines and played them an earlier piece of his, the Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, and then translated the graphs of their brain-waves as they reacted to the music into the textures of Polymorphia .
(3) Polymorphia and Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima were written by Penderecki in the early 60s.
(4) But threnodies are not an argument, and memories are definitely not facts (Hobsbawm's pithy condemnation of oral history, delivered at a conference where I was due to speak, was terrifying).
(5) Even if you hear Penderecki's pieces on their own, away from the films, it's easy to understand the appeal of music such as Polymorphia or his Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima .
(6) But because of the complexity of what's happening – particularly in pieces such as Threnody and Polymorphia, and how the sounds are bouncing around the concert hall, it becomes a very beautiful experience when you're there.
(7) There's another side to the liberation in Penderecki's music: the visual impact of his scores, the physical material musicians use to play pieces such as Fluorescences or the Threnody.
(8) Greenwood's 48 Responses to Polymorphia is, as its title suggests, an orchestral "remix" of the earlier work, while Popcorn Superhet Receiver was inspired by Threnody.