Word: tonally
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...party conversationalist and world-class gadfly, but he wasn't much of a composer -- which is, alas, primarily how he thought of himself. Turning his back on nearly every major compositional technique of the 20th century, with the notable exception of pastiche, Thomson wrote archly naive, perversely | wholesome music -- tonal, uncomplicated and almost completely unmemorable...
...sense, sculptural: the dense shadows of ink wash convey the shape and width of a head or a body with such emphasis that you feel you could almost lift it off the page. Drawings like Two Men Conversing or The Drinkers are so vivid in their tonal structure, and at the same time so natural and unpretentious in their expression, that you feel included in the meetings they depict. Daumier's line is always in motion, and startlingly responsive to the perceived moment. It is rarely just an outline: it surrounds the form with the haze of energy, made...
DOES ANYBODY REMEMBER JOHN LA MONTAINE? In 1959 he won the Pulitzer Prize for his Piano Concerto, Op. 9, and went on to a career as an unabashed writer of down-to-earth tonal music. Now the composer, 72, has issued several works on the Fredonia Discs label (3947 Fredonia Drive, Hollywood, California 90068) that ought to trigger a reappraisal. Wilderness Journal, a symphony for bass- baritone (the late Donald Gramm), organ and orchestra (the National Symphony), on texts by Thoreau, surges and soars, while The Nine Lessons of Christmas lyrically transcends its seasonal origins. And La Montaine the virtuoso...
...decisively to photography -- much to the puzzlement of the London art world. Photos were common speech, immediate, iconic but not "sensitive." They stood the Impressionist cult of the nuance on its head. And turning the black-and-white of photography back into color represented a fascinating challenge for a tonal painter like Sickert...
...Peter Alexander wove contrasting registers and tempos into a 12-tone musical fabric. Unlike the tonal classical music of previous centuries, 12-tone music does not use a hierarchy of pitches and chords. The music configures and reconfigures arrangements of all 12 notes in a scale throughout any given piece. The result is a seemingly unpredictable array of sounds that are highly structured and self-reflexive. The piece--for violin, cello and piano--paired soft, slow sections with furious fortes. The instruments seemed to communicate with each other while establishing a fascinating harmonic tension...