Word: tonal
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Adams' uncompromising craftsmanship helped pioneer the growing public recognition of photography as an art form. His method was to control rigorously every element of the picture: lighting, composition, focus. The image for him broke down into ten distinct "zones" of tonal quality, ranging from deepest black to pure white, so that every picture was a careful symmetry of light and dark. "The negative is the score," he said. "The print is the performance." By the mid-'60s, Adams had virtually ceased taking photographs for public consumption, concentrating instead on making prints of earlier works (the performance grew darker...
...legacy of the 16th century publisher Aldus Minutius. The skill and beauty of the Aldine editions of illustrated works like the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili fostered an unsurpassed quality in Venetian woodblock cutting. Indeed, Titian's twelve-sheet print The Submersion of Pharaoh's Army in the Red tonal vigor and grandeur of notation, is to woodcut what the Sistine Chapel is to fresco...
Fantasy took flight in their songs, from Yellow Submarine's childlike picture of a carefree existence beneath the waves to the vastly more complex and ominous vision in Strawberry Fields Forever of a retreat from uncertainty into a psychedelic copout. Its four separate meters, freewheeling modulations and titillating tonal trappings, showed that the Beatles had flowered as musicians. They learned to bend and stretch the pop-song mold, enriched their harmonic palette with modal colors, mixed in cross-rhythms, and pinched the classical devices of composers from Bach to Stockhausen. They supplemented their guitar sound with strings, baroque trumpets...
...House, is so accomplished at remixing hits for club use that his version of Far from Over, the single from the just released Staying Alive sound track, has been made the official one by RSO Records. He stretches the song by moving segments of it around and expanding the tonal range so that there are more deep-bass and high-register sounds. The result is a more spacious and physical experience on the dance floor. Says Jellybean: "Before, it seemed like a record just got started, and before you could dance, it was over...
Still, there is a problem with the music itself. Like some other composers of his generation, Bernstein no longer fully trusts his basically conservative musical convictions. The eclectic A Quiet Place is fundamentally tonal, but its melodies only infrequently blossom, as if Bernstein were inhibited by 30 years of modernism from writing the kind of straightforward, expressive music that obviously agrees with him. Instead, he has compromised with a bloated, percussive score that, stripped of its bluster and its "commitment," is too often little more than a plaintive bleat. Only in the orchestral interludes, affecting, purely musical ruminations that speak...