Word: tonal
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...masterpiece, The Melancholy of Departure, 1914, there are six, none "correct." This cloning of viewpoints acts in a way analogous to cubism. It jams the sense of illusionary depth and delivers the surface to the rule of the flat shape, which was the quintessential modernist strategy. In color, in tonal structure, and in its contradictory lighting, Rubin argues, De Chirico's style up to 1918 "was as alien to its supposed classical, 15th century models as it was dependent on the Parisian painting of its own moment." This view of De Chirico as formalist fits all the evidence...
...Tree and a Grain Field, circa 1654, is perfectly assimilated to the other elements of the painting. Such a canvas is pure Ruisdael: the precise eye for detail, the loving description of foliage, grass and bark that never degenerates into mere fact hunting; the hard-won density of tonal structure, the blessings of silvery light dropping from the sky. One can enter these pastures. Through them, the path to realism is seen to open...
...musical right. In a way, he is the Brahms of his day, writing in forms such as symphony, concerto and oratorio, preserving the traditional structures in the ace of the avant-gardist onslaught. Henze has mixed idioms freely throughout his career: harshly dissonant modernism, soaring lyricism and frankly tonal conservatism. But the glue that holds his work together is its humanism. Henze's music is meant to be played and listened to by people, not computers. With serialism now in some disrepute, his stature as one who saw another path for postwar music looms larger than ever...
Pissarro was the least spectacular of the impressionists. An eye used to Monet (and Monet is what many people believe impressionism was all about) will be apt to find Pissarro conservative-more of a tonal painter, almost, than a colorist...
...album by Old and New Dreams, a group of former Coleman sidemen, populated by such wizards as Don Cherry and Charlie Haden. "We want controlled contrast," Eicher says, and to prove it ECM has released two albums by Steve Reich that are less jazz than free-form contemporary classical, tonal experiments that sound like the air currents heard in a silent white room...