Word: toning
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...with his inheritance from the nineteenth century and the last few hundred years of Western music in general. How much shall he keep, and how shall he replace what he discards? If he decides to preserve tonality (which might be defined briefly as a system in which one tone, or a chord built on that tone, acts as a sort of aural home base) he has the advantage of manipulating the vocabulary of musical relations and tensions with which most of us are familiar since we have grown up in a world dominated by eighteenth and nineteenth-century tonality. Bartok...
...atonalists have not found it easy to resist. How can a piece of music be held together without the familiar tonal relationships? Some composers (Elliott Carter, for example) have attempted highly individual and cerebral ways of unifying a large work. Others have seen a revivifying solution in the twelve-tone system, from which has grown one of the most important languages in contemporary music...
...those on the lookout, exception could be taken to the stridency of Miss Foley's tone, and Mr. Gross's tendency to play on the top of the keys, preventing solidity, of tone in some passages. But these matters dwindled to minute proportions in view of their unerring techniques and intonation, and the endless subtleties and nuances within the broader conceptions of these pieces...
...trying to suppress their regionality. They are further coerced by pressure to eradicate some of the more betraying aspects of their own provincialism. As a result, the overwhelming majority of "distributional" acceptances, despite surface differences, soon become indistinguishable intellectually from the large group of Easterners whose attitudes set the tone for the college...
...measure of intellectual uniformity on its students. At Harvard, this technique involves an ever-increasing awareness of subjectivity in approaching academic problems. This is paralleled and reinforced by the Eastern tendency to evaluate people in psychological and economic terms, with less emphasis on appearance and immediate impressions. The underlying tone of circumspection and distrust, intensified by the double thrust of college and community, can but impose an extreme self-consciousness on the student. This creates a kind of intellectual narcissism, as well as a false identification of self-consciousness with self-knowledge that produces the familar know-it-all pose...