A Radical Tonality
Mon, Nov 5 2012, 11:17PM
#2
RE: A Radical Tonality
I strongly believe Hindemith said it all and to the very point. This is not food for thought. It is the fact of music! The rest could be good literature.
Parla
Thu, Nov 8 2012, 7:40PM
#3
RE: A Radical Tonality
The current general theory of hearing perception began with the work of Ernst Terhardt (his personal web page is here: http://www.mmk.e-technik.tu-muenchen.de/persons/ter.html ). His ideas are widely influential on how musical coding and transformation should be done, including the octave to octave balancing in digital music. The fundemental papers he wrote in the perception of consonance date from 1974-76, with continuing additions going forward. There is a good summary in the 1984 Spring issue of Musical Perception, where he lays out two distinct aspects of consonance: perception, and harmonic. His work indicated that Helmholtz' perceptual measurements were still largely valid, and those that were outdate could be replaced by more modern virtual pitch methods, that is the means by which the brain decides what wavelength to assign to a particular sound.
Despite this connection, perceptual consonance and contextual consonance are not the same thing: perceptual consonance is the absence of wave or percussive features, where as contextual perception is based on the what sound clusters are conditioning the listener. So while some kind of sense of musically contextual center is inevitable over some time, because hearing searches for the background, any particular implementation of it is not inevitable, nor is it the one from which all others sprung. A good example here is the work of Nial Griffith on tonal center perception.
Western music melds a wide variety of physical factors together – including equal tempered instruments which spreads the Pythagorean comma across the octaves and within the intervals in particular ways. This is not all that old – Bach would have found our instruments out of tune, and much of his construction made use of the reality that in a well tempered context, the keys are different from one another. He establishes tonal centers as a particular mode in a particular key, and then expected listeners to understand that one as the center for this piece.
This makes music such as the famous crab canon different in Bach's world, because each enharmonic move upwards changes the canon slightly.
Thu, Nov 22 2012, 9:09AM
#4
RE: A Radical Tonality
Normal
0
21
false
false
false
NL
JA
X-NONE
My two cents:
I believe I have to agree with Hindemith on this one. That is not to say I do not enjoy atonal
music: I love Schoenberg and his school, for instance. But I think we can’t deny that tonality (I am using the term in its broadest sense here, as any music having a tonal centre) is the norm, and that we can only hear atonal music as deviating from that norm.
If anything, I believe that’s where the power of atonal music comes from. It is precisely
because we expect a tonal centre that a piece of music that lack such a centre has such an impact (be it positive or negative) on the listener.
So, atonality is a valid compositional strategy, but the idea that it would ever replace tonality is absurd, because it depends on tonality. Any power atonal music had depends on the standard of tonality form which it is a deviation.
Tue, Nov 27 2012, 1:04PM
#5
RE: A Radical Tonality
Hi Folks!
Sorry for long absence!
Stirling that is fascinating what you are saying about the difference between perceptual and contextual factors - now that really is food for thought. A minor third isn't just a minor third then in context! Hm...
50 ml - your comments on your compositional methods are also fascinating. The Hindemith quotation chimes with what you say right back at the start of the thread. I'm glad that you are finding tonal melody still has many possibilities.
Mark
Tue, Nov 27 2012, 8:20PM
#6
RE: A Radical Tonality
Stirling - this was indeed fascinating. I only get back to this forum rarely, but it's a welcome change for some of what I've seen.
To Mark's quotations I'm tempted to add Schoenberg's "There is still plenty of good music to be written in C major."
On a different tack: there is, and this has come up elsewhere, the appearance of tonal centres as citations. Composers have quoted music by other composers since forever, but post-1900 this takes on, I think, an increasingly heavy semantic charge (and goodness knows musical semantics is a can of worms, though recent musicology has been a bit less scared of it). Examples that come to mind include Schoenberg's Ode to Napoleon, with its ironic Eb major Eroica twist at the end generated from a series that points in several tonal directions. Inevitably, too, and with some sadness given his recent passing, I have on my mind at the moment Henze's We Come to the River, where there is much tonal reference both of a parodic kind and in the deeply moving final chorus.
Thanks everyone for the fascinating input so far. Keep it up.
(Back in a few days...work planning is calling...and when I have had a chance to digest...)
Rob I will certainly be having a look at your publisher's site.
(Chris I'm struggling to keep up as well on a first glance at some points!)
Parla as you say we are not as far apart as originally we thought - I have a lot of time and respect for tonal harmony. Any language Parla changes and evolves over time, as the English language has done since Shakespeare. You might not see those changes as always for the best, but I see them as broadening the horizons. The language of music shouldn't be static. Here's some more food for thought Parla (and everyone else of course!)
'Dissonances are only the more remote consonances' - Schoenberg
'Tonality is a natural force, like gravity' - Hindemith
'The serial idea is based on a universe that finds itself in perpetual expansion' - Boulez
(Those three come from the book I referred to on the harsh critics thread - W. Thompson The Great Composers - she introduces each composer with a relevant quotation).
Mark