Word: tonalism
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CLEVE GRAY-Staempfli, 47 East 77th. A sensitive colorist, Gray smears his canvases with dark primaries and brilliant pastels, composing his abstractions with a sure feel for tonal balance and direction in space. Best: Vernal, a large dynamic treatment of vertical blues against white. Through...
...these throughout; except for the coda, there is only one measure for orchestra alone. The melodies for these remarks are correspondingly simple. Most are derived by some obvious alteration from the three-note cluster with which the soprano begins the work. Harmonically, too, the whole structure is clear; the tonal center seems to move from E to C to A, then explode into B, move around to E, and then conclude...
...story of the sinking of Atlantis to a young man named Christopher Columbus. The story winds through the wanderings of Hercules, his destruction of the three-headed monster Geryones, and finally ends with the vision of Columbus-with alleluias of thanksgiving for the land he will soon discover. Completely tonal, full of color and exciting contrasts, the heroic score was never overwhelming, always deft in its handling of a myriad of descriptive effects. And the weightiness of the theme was relieved by occasional touches of humor, most strikingly with the singing of the three-headed Geryones (Tenors Pier Francesco Poli...
Since the Claremont Quartet played three modern works Thursday night, the question naturally arises of how radical each quartet was--traditional? tonal? or dissonant? "formless"? But assigning each work its spot on a spectrum of radicalism is quite irrelevant to experiencing them, because dissonance, tonality and the like have a quite dubious bearing on the actual emotional content of the music. Indeed, the quartets of Billy Jim Layton and Robert Moevs (both Assistant Professors) were more "shocking" than that of Anton Webern. You don't have to consult the dialectic before calling any of them modern...
...repertoire of viola music is in a sad state; witness the fact that the two best pieces on the program were transcriptions (Brahms originally wrote his sonata for clarinet). Doktor demonstrated, nicely the unique tonal powers of the viola: all that lack now are more good opportunities to exploit them...