This is an incantatory score of overlapping drones, quietly pungent harmonies and bits of melody sung in slightly odd parallel intervals.

Their music, expansively lyrical yet pungent with shifting harmonies, conveys the ambiguity.

In the first movement, bitonal relationships produce gently dissonant, pungent harmonies.

A soloist would pull off an especially acrobatic phrase, or superimpose a piece of pungent harmony on a tune, and eyebrows would rise.

The sprawling Piano Sonata, completed in 1920, is visionary music, thick with every-which-way counterpoint and dense, pungent harmonies.

But Mr. Catan's score has sumptuous colors and pungent harmonies spiked with dissonance.

It does not exactly disappoint: the arching melodic line is cushioned by sweetly pungent harmony.

It has also been explained as containing "vital rhythms" and "pungent harmonies."

Though the aria she performed here, with Ms. Gordon at the piano, is striking for its pungent harmony, there is a stiffness in the vocal writing.

Though the music for the trio evokes radio jingles of the time, Bernstein spikes that jazzy style with pungent harmonies and fractured meters.