Word: tonalities
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...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...
...granted that "movements" are more a dealer's spiel than a real feature of current art, there are still affinities among artists. What are the main ones here? To begin with, realist painting-but with a twist. The plain declarative style of tonal realism, whose American master is Philip Pearlstein, is hardly in evidence, although there are some exquisitely rendered pastel studies of gray, tumblng Midwestern skies by William Beckman at the Hirshhorn, and the Whitney has some beautifully observed images by William Bailey (still life) and Rackstraw Downes (panoramic landscape). The best figurative work at the Guggenheim...