Word: tonalities
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...present style (Canticum Sacrum, In Memoriam Dylan Thomas), Stravinsky is experimenting with the serial or tone row technique of Arnold Schoenberg (see below), whom he once regarded as the leader of an alien musical camp. Said protean Igor Stravinsky on his 75th birthday: "I simply cannot do without a tonal row, and have come more and more to feel that it is 'the way of the future...
Climax of the birthday celebration was a Los Angeles performance of his latest work, a ballet score titled Agon (to be given in New York next fall). Agon shows just how far he has gone with tonal-row composition. A 20-minute work, it is scored for "twelve dancers and twelve notes," calls for the largest orchestra since Stravinsky's Symphony in Three Movements (1945). The fast, heavily percussioned score is cast in patterns of enormous rhythmic complexity. In its sheer harmonic and rhythmic invention, its virility, its brilliance of orchestration, the work is among the most dazzling music...
...vigor of his brushwork, his near-abstract paintings of nature, and his suggestive ambiguity of object and reflection.* Putting the final stamp of approval on Monet for the avant-garde is Manhattan Critic Clement Greenberg, who in praising Monet's "free, calligraphic brush-work and loose, tonal delineation of form," now confirms that much modern U.S. painting needs a new name: "abstract impressionism...
...melting into the passionate sections with sharply contrasting warmth. The players neatly sorted out the intricacies of Martinet's twelve-tone Variations and romped through Milhaud's dancy, polytonal Quartet No. 13. They spectacularly dramatized Martinon's Quartet, Op. 43, with its melodramatic outbursts, its massed tonal tumbles, its lovely patterns in the adagio movement and its one incredible moment of whistling, fluting overtones...
...sang for half an hour without emitting a single word, Vaughan Williams' extraordinary Flos Campi. In this piece the chorus vocalizes on all kinds of vowel sounds and musically sustainable consonants. The composer was not interested in expressing ideas, but rather in evoking moods by exploiting sheer sonority and tonal colors. Occasionally there appeared such typical Vaughan Williams features as chordal parallelism; but mixed in with them were wonderful wailing appoggiaturas and, above all non-Western melodic lines that so characteristically turned back on themselves--which suffused the whole with a subtle, intoxicating exoticism. An important role went...