Word: tonally
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Learning Vietnamese is appropriately perplexing. With its six distinct tonal levels, it is as hard to master as the country's current politics and history. To sift through the grammar is easy enough but the tonal business is frustrating. One word may have two, three, or even four completely different meanings depending upon the pitch and stress you use. There is a well-known and true story of Robert McNamara's difficulty with the language on his frequent visits to Saigon. He likes to make a small pleasantry to his Vietnamese audience--usually "Vietnam for 1000 years." Unfortunately his aides...
...second half of the program was a definite improvement over the first. Both the works had been played at previous concerts, and performances were generally brighter and more confident. The Wind Ensemble reappeared with Robert Kurka's Suite from The Good Soldier Schweik. This basically tonal work, composed in 1956, treads perilously close to eclecticism as it attempts to combine all the classic styles of twentieth century music: the playful dissonance of Prokofieff, the biting sarcasm of Mahler, a Milhaud-like use of jazz, and insistent rhythms at once reminiscent of Igor Stravinsky and Leonard Bernstein. Combined with the nearly...
...most part from grey to basic black, was Von Karajan's own. The cast was handpicked, and the hand was his. He guided the Met's orchestra through what amounted to a graduate seminar on Wagnerian sonority, galvanizing that frequently scraggly ensemble into a pliant, rich tonal fabric...
...Without sacrificing stylistic elegance, he draws from both instruments the rustic grace and fresh-air feeling of the English countryside, redeeming them from sentimentality as well as musicological pedantry. To make up for the narrow dynamic range of the guitar, he achieves dramatic effects with an extraordinary variety of tonal colors. Subtle, jazzlike rhythms, throbbing chords, silvery lines, harplike plinks, resonant harpsichord and piano tones, all serve not to decorate or distract but to clarify the structure of the music...
Moreover, Strawberry Fields, with its four separate meters, freewheeling modulations and titillating tonal trappings, showed that the Beatles had flowered as musicians. They learned to bend and stretch the pop-song mold, enriched their harmonic palette with modal colors, mixed in cross-rhythms, and pinched the classical devices of composers from Bach to Stockhausen. They supplemented their guitar sound with strings, baroque trumpets, even a calliope. With the help of their engineer, arranger and record producer, George Martin, they plugged into a galaxy of space-age electronic effects, achieved partly through a mixture of tapes run backward and at various...