threnody

Of course, “the unspeakable horror of the literary life” — to borrow Mr. Earbrass’s phrase from Edward Gorey’s “The Unstrung Harp” — is a familiar threnody in the writing biz.

From Washington Post ● May 25, 2022

Mr. Greenwood’s own score for the movie “There Will Be Blood,” for example, features his “Popcorn Superhet Receiver,” a work directly inspired by the Hiroshima threnody.

From New York Times ● Mar. 29, 2020

It was an acute and devastating threnody, which King read in a methodical cadence.

From The New Yorker ● Apr. 3, 2017

After a savage climax, a slow, occasionally discursive string threnody takes over, during which the brass intrusions gradually lose some ferocity and the music moves towards a tentative nobility.

From The Guardian ● Jun. 11, 2012

Then we heard the Muses sing a threnody in nine immortal voices.

From "The Odyssey" by Homer

On “From Ukraine, For Ukraine,” a darkly brilliant new omnibus album by the cutting-edge Kyiv label Standard Deviation, grief and rage melt into impudently beautiful contemporary threnodies.

From New York Times ● Dec. 7, 2022

By fusing gay rage and sorrow with familiar musical gestures—Straussian orchestral explosions, Samuel Barber-like threnodies for strings—it ennobled a portion of the population for which many orchestra subscribers might have felt disgust.

From The New Yorker ● May 30, 2019

Gazing at demagoguery, environmental ruin and intimate betrayal, Thom Yorke croons threnodies, not lullabies.

From New York Times ● Dec. 7, 2016

The nation that was once the world's most famous optimist began to shuffle around in a bathrobe, feeling mediocre and depleted, listening to threnodies by the Club of Rome.

From Time Magazine Archive

Ultimately, life is for him a pageant with intervals for sentimental threnodies and rhetorical declamation.

From Post-Augustan Poetry From Seneca to Juvenal by Harold Edgeworth Butler