Word: tonal
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Strand discovered the artistic possibilities of sharp focus and modern subject matter. Their approach was formal, carefully--considered, composed and crafted. This style reached its peak in the 40's with the work of Edward Weston. Weston photographed mainly nudes, still lifes and landscapes, emphasizing the photograph's wide, tonal scale and capacity to render diamond-sharp details...
Whither music? The final, triumphant answer is "yes," by which Bernstein means "tonality." He believes that his preference for tonality is more than a matter of his personal taste, that it is an innate, physical necessity. The very existence of the Viennese school's atonal music, not to mention non-tonal music of other cultures and the pre-tonal music of the Renaissance, argues that tonality is not universal, but Bernstein claims that Schoenberg denied his own inner instincts, and, outrageously, that "Schoenberg to this day has not found his public...
RECALLING HIS explanation in the first lecture of the harmonic series he says that tonality is based on immutable physical laws. It's true that some of the essential structures of Western music are to be found in the overtone series. Values of consonance and dissonance and some tonal relationships are facts of nature and not arbitrary cultural conventions. But the harmonic series doesn't explain the development of tonality, a complex system of relationships and progressions of tension and release, stability and instability--embodying all of the conventions of Western harmony. Above all, tonality involves a central, tonic note...
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...
...Bernstein's treatment of Schoenberg suffers from the same dogmatism he criticizes in Adorno. His failure is a failure to listen to the music on its own terms. He imposes his tonal expectations on works that have a different internal logic. He points triumphantly to the Bach chorale quoted at the end of Berg's Violin Concerto, without recognizing it as a historical allusion like those he found in Stravinsky and Eliot. Berg used tonal devices frequently for certain kinds of effects, but rarely as a basic principle of his music...