Word: tonally
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...BERNSTEIN'S survey of Western music arrives at the 20th century, his emphasis on innateness and universality suddenly takes on new significance. The 19th century ended "with a life-and-death crisis lurking around the corner." Mahler's Ninth Symphony, a great song of death, is the last, barely tonal expression of a bloated Romanticism dying of its own weight. The new century will have to face the disintegration of tonality, a process which began nearly a hundred years earlier with the Beethoven of the Gross Fuge and the last piano sonatas...
Whither music? The final, triumphant answer is "yes," by which Bernstein means "tonality." He believes that his preference for tonality is more than a matter of his personal taste, that it is an innate, physical necessity. The very existence of the Viennese school's atonal music, not to mention non-tonal music of other cultures and the pre-tonal music of the Renaissance, argues that tonality is not universal, but Bernstein claims that Schoenberg denied his own inner instincts, and, outrageously, that "Schoenberg to this day has not found his public...
RECALLING HIS explanation in the first lecture of the harmonic series he says that tonality is based on immutable physical laws. It's true that some of the essential structures of Western music are to be found in the overtone series. Values of consonance and dissonance and some tonal relationships are facts of nature and not arbitrary cultural conventions. But the harmonic series doesn't explain the development of tonality, a complex system of relationships and progressions of tension and release, stability and instability--embodying all of the conventions of Western harmony. Above all, tonality involves a central, tonic note...
Bernstein, who knows better, often finds tonality where there is none. According to him, the strings in Ives' Unanswered Question play nothing but "pure tonal triads" in C major. What he doesn't say is that the final chord is unresolved, because he wants to claim that "eternal, immortal tonality" is the answer to the solo trumpet's question, which Ives, after all, meant to be unanswered...
...capstone of the Mass builds to Old Testament grandeur. Corboz has a chambered vision. Employing a small orchestra and a mixed chorus of three dozen or so voices, he turns in a finely tuned performance in authentic Baroque style. The vocalism is brisk and light, blending perfect tonal balance with the instruments. Sound quality on both albums is excellent. ∙Joan Downs