threnody

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.

When you’re expecting extinction, it makes sense to record the threnody in advance.

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.

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.

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.