The highly chromatic music featured harsh dissonances and unresolved harmonies.

Composers used passing tones to avoid parallel intervals, creating brief harsher dissonances, foreshadowing the style of counterpoint developed in the Renaissance.

In these works the often harsh dissonances of his earlier music are less evident: or, as Simon Wright puts it, they are "sweetened".

His idiosyncratic and hard to categorize compositional language includes elements from different musical traditions, in an alternation and often superimposition of harsh dissonance and lyricism.

For example, if the melody note is the root of the chord, including a major seventh can frequently cause a harsh dissonance.

But many other Mingus tunes are complex and densely layered, and it's not unusual to see listeners wince at some of the harsher dissonances.

They flapped away, croaking with harsh dissonance.

It is noted for its "energy, optimism, rhythmic diversity, colourful orchestration, liberated tonality without harsh dissonance, and pervading lyricism."

Mr. Cui's songs carry his lyrics from mourning to harsh dissonance to jubilation.

The colorful work, which artfully mixes tonal gestures with harsh dissonance, consists of three movements joined by extended cadenzas, the first intensely quiet, the second thunderously loud.