Francis, with his style of radical simplicity and his direct manner, has shifted things.
Employing a style of rigorous simplicity, he evokes a prevailing atmosphere of neurotic tensions with sharp economy.
His website describes him as "a stiff-necked country troubadour with an affinity for honky-tonks and possessing a style of rustic simplicity".
In his late compositions he turned away from his previous models, composers Hector Berlioz and Giacomo Meyerbeer, and cultivated a style of studied simplicity.
Add to this a prose style of unvarnished simplicity and you have the Victorian novel that cast a spell over its generation.
That is because of what his biographer, Stephen Cooper, has called "a style of deceptive simplicity, emotional immediacy and tremendous psychological point," a style that exultantly leaps off the page to captivate the reader.
That book showed Mailer to be capable of controlling a style of lyrical simplicity, whereas his reputation had been built on baroque, complex sentences, fizzing with ideas to the point of genius or idiocy.
Thanks in part to his good friend Harold Clurman of the Group Theatre, who had relocated to Hollywood, and inspired in part by Virgil Thomson's film work, Copland finally got his foot in the door, received the Steinbeck assignment, and produced a score in his new style of "imposed simplicity" (although without the obvious borrowing from folk music or cowboy songs).
But it was not simply that Dylan had transgressed the festival's acoustic bias: the intemperate reception was in part a protest that the folk scene's unrivalled laureate had turned his back on the "duty" to protest, in a style of singalong simplicity, in favour of more personal themes, tackled in a more personal language.
In the plotless ballet Monotones I and II, Ashton took inspiration from two Satie scores, Trois Gymnopédies and Les Gnossiennes, to choreograph in a style of limpid simplicity, which he himself described as "expressing nothing but itself, and thereby expressing a thousand degrees and facets of emotion".
