Word: tonal
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...tamed by good taste. The expertise of his orchestral writing is remarkable-bold blocks of brass sound, piquant wisps of woodwind, supple simplicity in the strings. Perhaps the most important thing about his composition is that he has dared to opt for tradition over "now" chic: the idiom is tonal and reflects the post-romantic passions of the early 20th century...
Berman's thesis, The Evolution of Tonal Thinking in the Works of Claude Debussy, was completed in 1965, and he was awarded his Ph.D. that June. He feels that "Debussy was the final rupture from classical tonal thinking, although this break was prefigured and prepared by nineteenth century practice as far back as Beethoven. Wagner didn't make it the way Debussy did. While the concise structures of eighteenth century tonality seem almost irrelevant to the Wagnerian rhetoric, Wagner still relies on the concept of smooth progressions. Debussy's progressions are classical period. Nevertheless, Debussy does not deny tonality...
...Barenboim and Du Pré team proves that the sight and sound of two brilliant artists conquering continents hand in hand has a magical allure all its own. But there is far more to these players than such allure. Today Jacqueline's cello playing is a marvel of tonal beauty and instinctive emotion, backed by a prodigious technical grasp. As aurorally mellow as the late Emanuel Feuermann, as powerful of phrase as one of her former mentors Pablo Casals, Jacqueline is one of the most eloquent and soulful cellists alive...
...only link for many years between the neo-classical Boulanger and the expressionistic Schoenbergian schools of music, he developed a highly individual, tonal style that is at once bitter and lyrical. Buoyed up by his melodies, his unaffected words often strike the sincere and ingenuous chord of a folksong...
Their goal was ambitious: to extend the language of jazz even farther than the progressives and, at the same time, restore its old freewheeling gut-blues intensity. Drawing on African primitivism, Mediterranean and Asian folk music, and sounding at times like Viennese atonalists, the new jazzmen vary tonal centers, when they are used at all, as often as they do moods. Basic rhythms, unavoidable before, are often merely implied or forgotten entirely now. But as Ornette Coleman says, "When it's done with taste and love, hardly anybody wouldn't like...