Word: tonal
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...both in color and in texture: tremulous depths of pinkish-gray held within the sallow planes of a face, innumerable gradations of Venetian red and salmon pink in the body of a nude, rescued from mere allusiveness by the vehement drawing of shadow that gives Kossoff's work its tonal framework. Its solidity is relieved, almost involuntarily, by the whipping of skeins of pigment fallen directly from the brush, which work as a form of counterdrawing, lifting the thick surfaces from inertia...
...other champs-for-a-day: an accountant, a short-order cook named Larry, a computer specialist who beams while a wag introduces him as "the greatest lead voice from Florida." He bows and launches into Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven. Fellowship and fun count for more than tonal quality in barbershopping, a thriving movement that celebrates a unique song style: the four-part unaccompanied harmony that flourished at the turn of the century on porches, street corners, saloons and, yes, barbershops across America. In its early years, barbershop singing was pretty much a male preserve, but today both...
Despite its confident lyricism and clear passions, Tracks bears the marks of the academic writers' workshop. The device of alternating the voices of the two narrators is schematic and of limited tonal interest. Plot is subordinated to episodic tours de force. In small doses, the graphic descriptions are impressive, but they can also be so relentless as to make the author sound like the thinking reader's Jean Auel...
Some 2 1/2 centuries after Bach welded the twelve major and minor keys into a harmonious whole in The Well-Tempered Clavier, 185 years after Beethoven stretched the boundaries of the symphony with the "Eroica," and 65 years after Arnold Schoenberg exploded the tonal universe by unleashing the power of the twelve-tone system, classical music can still be a vital, potent art. But it needs a kind of panoramic energy, one that explores and prizes its past, frankly assesses its present and enthusiastically prepares for its future...
Adams, who a decade ago was writing minimalist essays in broken chords and chugging rhythms, has evolved a more flexible, conventional tonal language, fleshed out with references to past masters (Debussy, Beethoven, Richard Strauss) and even Glenn Miller, as the dramatic situation demands. There has always been a theatricality about Adams' music -- the 1981 Harmonium was a vivid choral setting of poetry by John Donne and Emily Dickinson -- and in Nixon its dramatic qualities have flowered. The figures are sharply characterized: Nixon (James Maddalena), for example, is a gruff baritone whose music is often stiff and halting, while Chairman...