Word: tonally
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...scenario: Bill and Hillary Clinton sit down with Barbara Walters in the White House family quarters. Barbara is empowered to hear confessions and grant absolution--the priestess of high colonics for the troubled celebrity mind. Her sacramental touch, her extreme unctuousness, is the very thing to preside over the tonal subtleties of this encounter--the faux intimacy, the clucking censure, the wet sympathy. Clinton and Walters might make beautiful music together, a harmony of ineffable falsenesses...
...Revolutionnaire et Romantique have recorded Schumann's orchestral music (Archiv Produktion; 3 CDs) using period instruments and adhering to period performance practices. The effect is analogous to the restored ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Stripped of the meddling of others (added parts, re-written transitions, etc.) and the blurred tonal qualities that large modern ensembles can create, these fervent performances reveal sculptural definition, brightness, clarity and beauty of a previously undisclosed intensity...
...that sound like Zen koans are almost always a sign of musical vapidity (New Age alert!). But not here. On his seventh disc as a leader, this adventurous 27-year-old jazz pianist justifies the title's paradox with playing that is full of odd stops and starts and tonal shifts, all of which he negotiates with delicacy rather than flash. This is music that manages to be both prickly and soothing--like anxious lullabies (to suggest another unappetizing title). Though Keezer gives himself three solo numbers--a highlight being his gentle deconstruction of Lush Life--the heart...
...work, everything is staked on sensation and desire. His aim was not to argue coherence but to go for the strongest level of feeling. He conveyed it with tremendous plastic force, making you feel the weight of forms and the tension of their relationships mainly by drawing and tonal structure. He was never a great colorist, like Matisse or Pierre Bonnard. But through metaphor, he crammed layers of meaning together to produce flashes of revelation. In the process, he reversed one of the currents of modern art. Modernism had rejected storytelling: what mattered was formal relationships. But Picasso brought...
...Europe for the U.S., settling in Hollywood. In 1969 he moved to New York City. (The story goes that when asked why he made such a move at his advanced age, he replied, "To mutate faster.") Over the years, Stravinsky experimented with virtually every technique of 20th century music: tonal, polytonal and 12-tone serialism. He reinvented and personalized each form while adapting the melodic styles of earlier eras to the new times. In the end, his own musical voice always prevailed...