What's the difference between lamentation and threnody?

Lamentation


Definition:

  • (n.) The act of bewailing; audible expression of sorrow; wailing; moaning.
  • (n.) A book of the Old Testament attributed to the prophet Jeremiah, and taking its name from the nature of its contents.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Foster has long admired the speed with which these were built, and laments how Britain has dithered about London's airports.
  • (2) The screen-printing evening is taking place in Bushwick, an area known for – or lamented as – being the hippest part of Brooklyn.
  • (3) The debates and the campaign are increasingly covered as entertainment,” Rubio said, lamenting the networks’ hunt for ratings.
  • (4) Prior to the constitutional reform bill being introduced last July, Mandelson had lamented in an interview with the Financial Times that it was "not legally possible" for him to stand again as an MP.
  • (5) In an interview with the Qingdao Morning Post, one man lamented how in recent years his wife had frittered away 130,000 yuan (£13,500) of their hard-earned savings on Double Eleven purchases – thus dashing their dreams of buying a new home.
  • (6) If peerages are in effect being sold, the academics argue, “these could be thought of as the ‘average price’ per party.” Former Liberal Democrat peer, Matthew Oakeshott, who on leaving the Lords in May last year lamented that his efforts to uncover cash-for-honours deals across the parties had failed, told the Observer that the case against the system, and the parties, was now compelling.
  • (7) Alongside that political failing is a lamentable failure of the police command culture.
  • (8) Calling on Israel to “break with its lamentable track record” and hold wrongdoers responsible, the hard-hitting report commissioned by the UN human rights council lays most of the blame for Israel’s suspected violations at the feet of the country’s political and military leadership.
  • (9) He also expresses his lament that Australia’s $46 million bid, which earned one vote as the World Cup was controversially awarded to Qatar, never stood a chance.
  • (10) Farah addressed the media in Birmingham on Saturday, lamenting his name being “dragged through the mud” because of his links to Salazar, despite no allegations of wrongdoing against him personally.
  • (11) Although that guarantee is traditionally understood to prohibit intentional discrimination under existing laws, equal protection does not end there … to know the history of our nation is to understand its long and lamentable record of stymieing the right of racial minorities to participate in the political process.” Justice Elena Kagan, another of the court’s liberals, sat out of the case due to conflicts of interest.
  • (12) It's music that defines compassion, lament, and loss, to which you can only surrender in moist-eyed wonder.
  • (13) Or you might find it rather sad that someone who spends a lot of their time lamenting how society's unrealistic beauty standards are used to control and oppress women is a victim of those same standards.
  • (14) But recounting the story of one of the key experiences of European integration, the painter and decorator sounded elegiac, as if describing not current realities but those of a lamented past.
  • (15) The deputy prime minister, Bülent Arinc, one of the co-founders of the ruling Islamic-rooted Justice and Development party (AKP), made the comment while lamenting the moral decline of modern society.
  • (16) For veterans of the women's movement there may be something unnerving about hearing the familiar slogans from Tory mouths – a sense that, as a female columnist lamented recently of Mensch, these late converts are "the wrong kind" of feminists.
  • (17) Wenger, though, warmed to a familiar theme when he lamented the importance that is attached to incoming signings.
  • (18) Hollande vowed to tackle France's standing as the most pessimistic country in Europe , "perhaps in the world", lamenting: "There are countries at war who are more optimistic than us."
  • (19) On Twitter , Wade lamented what he called another “act of senseless gun violence” which meant “4 kids lost their mom for NO REASON”.
  • (20) "We didn't make any mistakes today," Poyet lamented.

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.