Word: chordal
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...long-awaited score proved to be typical Orff, avoiding such devices as standard harmonic progressions or even the modern "tone row." Instead, it sustained for page after page a single chordal theme, varied only with starkly primitive rhythm in the orchestra and percussion-punctuated declamation by the singers. The work was typical, too, in its close welding of music to text (by 18th century German Poet Friedrich Hölderlin). The oddly assorted orchestra-which included four pianos for eight players, four harps, a glass harmonica, marimbaphone, xylophones, bongos, congas, gongs and no strings except for nine double basses-served...
Randall Thompson has chosen the last course, bringing a modern harmonic vocabulary to the forms and even the styles of the classical composers. His most distinctive characteristic--the parallel chordal progressions and the contrary motion of mirroring lines shows the same concern for pattern that characterizes baroque music. His counterpoint is at times almost indistinguishable from late baroque, especially in his formal fugues, and he avoids the unusual intervals of contemporary music in favor of more traditional linear movement...
...participation of two excellent choruses which are quite different in character and style. The Harvard Glee Club is very large and has a deeper tone than the smaller Yale group. The latter has a lighter quality, emphasizing balance and cohesion, showing itself best in works which are essentially chordal, while the Harvard chorus is strongest in polyphony. The Yale group is perhaps more adapted to performing on its own, and its tone is more rounded, having a sort of sophisticated barber shop quality; while the Harvard chorus sounds at times as though it missed the upper half, mostly...
...works on this record are performed with a sense of style, and each is individually satisfactory. The record as a whole suffers from a certain amount of monotony, since most of these pieces are relatively chordal, or else have the separate lines obscured, with the result that there is not much polyphonic interest...
...Williams' extraordinary Flos Campi. In this piece the chorus vocalizes on all kinds of vowel sounds and musically sustainable consonants. The composer was not interested in expressing ideas, but rather in evoking moods by exploiting sheer sonority and tonal colors. Occasionally there appeared such typical Vaughan Williams features as chordal parallelism; but mixed in with them were wonderful wailing appoggiaturas and, above all non-Western melodic lines that so characteristically turned back on themselves--which suffused the whole with a subtle, intoxicating exoticism. An important role went to a solo viola, superbly played by Jean Comstock, which expressed itself...