White House Symphony

The New Yorker's music critic Alex Ross appreciates the tonal range of the pundits' response to Scott McLellan's White House memoir, finding "the same things over and over, in strikingly similar speech-melodic patterns. I could cite Janacek's pioneering work on speech-melody in the Czech language, but in this company it seems more fitting to mention Harry Partch. Notice the recurrent falling intervals of 'puzzled" the melancholy stepwise-descending motif of 'Not the Scott we knew' (or "It doesn't sound like Scott') the fairly consistent tuning of the word 'Stumped'..."