Mr. Harrison's music unfurls at a leisurely pace, its long, meandering melodies underpinned by static, dronelike harmonies.

"In a Sentimental Mood" makes use of a musical technique called contrapuntal or chromatic embellishment of static harmony.

But there is also a large camp of anti-Pärtians: those who hear the endlessly spinning canons as merely stupefying, the purposefully static harmonies as impoverished.

The perfection this "spirit" reveals is a perfection of static harmony.

Far from living in static harmony, periwinkles, mussels, crabs, grasses and other organisms work together to build beaches and marshes, Dr. Bertness said.

There were dense slabs of hammering rhythm, static harmony, great moving plates of collective improvisation, which he ordered around as he conducted onstage.

Meanwhile the bass emphasizes the E tonic in a static harmony.

In addition, the entanglement of the passages in static harmony is possibly more telling.

Lasting nearly 45 minutes, the work used ostinatos and regular swing time, moving and static harmony and, at times, seemingly no harmony at all.

From this point onward, Mr. Davis would return often to music based on static, stripped-down harmonies.