To ears steeped in that repertory, earlier harmonic styles can sound alien, and the further back in time you move, the odder the music sounds.
He did not believe in the stereotyped harmonic procedures of the 19th century, and indeed it becomes clear from a study of mid-20th-century music that the earlier harmonic methods were being followed in an arbitrary, academic manner.
One of his early harmonic inspirations was Louis Armstrong, and he said he helped teach a young Charlie Parker how to switch from one chord to another when they were both active in Kansas City.
Those qualities are matched, though in an earlier harmonic accent, in the Mendelssohn Octet, represented here by a lively, seat-of-the-pants reading of the opening Allegro moderato con fuoco movement.
This focus is common to other European traditions, and is known as postmodernism, a school of thought that draws on earlier harmonic and melodic concepts that pre-date the conceptions of atonality and dissonance.
But its language advances the game several paces: the bright, early Baroque harmonic accent, still vivid in the Tunder, is beginning to fade here.
Among Ptolemy's earliest treatises, the Harmonics investigated musical theory while steering a middle course between an extreme empiricism and the mystical arithmetical speculations associated with Pythagoreanism.
Mr. Hartke's sophisticated music seems to leap from the present back to those early days of harmonic awakening, while grazing all of the music that came in between.
Both Fux and Bach were products of the evolution of tonal harmony, a system of key relations which brought with it the possibility of basing large-scale forms not only on melodic variation or counterpoint, as earlier, but on harmonic tension and modulation.
However, as demonstrated above, the maximum achievable peak power at the fundamental ML state is strictly limited by the early onset of the harmonic ML for lasers with repetition frequency from hundreds of MHz to few GHz.
