Word: chord
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...believe it's no accident that the German word satz means both sentence and symphonic movement." This seems a bit simplistic, though, so he tries again with parts of speech, equating nouns with motifs and adjectives with their harmonic underpinnings--Wagner's Fate motif played over a diminished chord could mean something like "cruel fate." Verbs naturally correspond to rhythm, so Bernstein adds some triple meter at the piano and comes up with a complete sentence, "cruel fate waltzes...
Bernstein, who knows better, often finds tonality where there is none. According to him, the strings in Ives' Unanswered Question play nothing but "pure tonal triads" in C major. What he doesn't say is that the final chord is unresolved, because he wants to claim that "eternal, immortal tonality" is the answer to the solo trumpet's question, which Ives, after all, meant to be unanswered...
...denied sense of tonality," he says that Stockhausen's Stimmung "spends seventy minutes in B-flat major." In fact, Stimmung is a radically minimalist work consisting of six vocalists humming and chanting a low B-flat fundamental and its various overtones--seventy minutes of some kind of B-flat chord, but not the key of B-flat major by anybody's definition, and certainly not anything resembling tonality...
Joni's first experiment with different tunings came when she encountered the F chord, a nemesis of guitar novices. It is normally made by placing the index finger across all six strings while three other fingers spastically contort to positions lower on the neck of the guitar. Joni discovered that by retuning five of the six strings several half steps, she could strum an open F chord that had a deeper, richer sound. New, unique chords were possible, and because they could be formed simply by moving one finger between different frets, intricate eight-note-to-the-bar finger...
...midafternoon, Pianist Vladimir Ashkenazy sounded the final chord of a recital at New York's 92nd Street Y.M. & Y.W.H.A. Holding up his watch and resolutely waving off all requests for encores, he declared, "You have been most gracious, but I must go to hear Vladimir Horowitz...