Tonality

Tonality is a musical system in which hierarchical pitch relationships are based around a tonic triad, and on hierarchical relationships between that central triad and the seven others in a key. Tonality was the predominant musical system in the European tradition of classical music from the late 1500s until early in the 20th century, and in modern times has been globalized as the central vehicle for popular music. The term tonalité originated with Alexandre-Étienne Choron (1810) and was borrowed by François-Joseph Fétis in 1840 (Reti 1958,^{[page needed]}; Simms 1975, 119; Judd 1998a, 5; Heyer 2001; Brown 2005, xiii). According to Carl Dahlhaus, however, the term tonalité was only coined by Castil-Blaze in 1821 (Dahlhaus, 1967, 960; Dahlhaus 1980, 51).

Although Fétis used it as a general term for a system of musical organization and spoke of types de tonalités rather than a single system, today the term is most often used to refer to major–minor tonality, the system of musical organization of the common practice period, and of Western-influenced popular music throughout much of the world today. Major-minor tonality is also called harmonic tonality, diatonic tonality, common practice tonality, functional tonality, or just tonality.

Characteristics and features

The tonal system prevalent in the common-practice period is often known as major-minor tonality, in which each triad has a tonal function in relation to the tonic triad and with other triads in the key. The functions/relationships of the triads, in analysis, are now usually labeled with Roman numerals. The basic harmonic functions are the tonic (I) and the dominant (V). There are many pre-dominant (dominant preparation) triads: II⁶ or II; IV or IV⁶, vi, and chromatic variants of these.^{[citation needed]}

David Cope (1997, ^{[page needed]}) considers key, consonance and dissonance (relaxation and tension, respectively), and hierarchical relationships to be the three most basic concepts in tonality.

Carl Dahlhaus (1990,^{[page needed]}) lists the characteristic schemata of tonal harmony, "typified in the compositional formulae of the 16th [sic] and early 17th centuries" as the "complete cadence" I–ii–V–I, I–IV–V–I, I–IV–I–V–I; the circle of fifths progression I–IV–vii°–iii–vi–ii–V–I; and the major–minor parallelism: minor v–i–VII–III equals major: iii–vi–V–I; or minor: III–VII–i–v equals major: I–V–vi–iii. The last of these progressions is characterized by "retrograde" harmonic motion.

In the 20th and 21st centuries, other scales or modes have been introduced for variety within the context of a major–minor tonal system without disturbing the diatonic nature of the work. The major scale predominates, and the melodic minor contains nine pitches (seven with two alterable). The seven basic notes of a scale are notated in the key signature, and whether the piece is in major or minor mode is either stated in the title or implied in the piece (there is a major and minor key for each key signature).^{[citation needed]}

Form

At the macro-level, the traditional form of tonal music begins and ends in a home key, and many tonal works move to a closely related key relative key. The key signature of the closely related key will be one accidental different from the tonic, with the exception of the tonic minor or major. A tonality is established in many ways, traditionally accomplished through the harmonic implications of a cadence, which is two chords in succession which give a feeling of completion or rest at the end of a phrase, with the most common being <dominant> to <tonic>.^{[citation needed]}

Consonance and dissonance

In the context of tonal organization, a chord or a note is said to be consonant when it implies stability, and dissonant when it implies instability. This is not the same as the ordinary use of the words consonant and dissonant.^{[clarification needed]} A dissonant chord is in tension against the tonic, and implies that the music is distant from that tonic chord. Resolution is the process by which the harmonic progression moves from dissonant chords to consonant chords and follows counterpoint or voice leading. Voice leading is a description of the horizontal movement of the music, as opposed to chords which are considered the vertical.^{[citation needed]}

Traditional tonal music is described in terms of a scale degrees, upon which are built chords. Chords in order form progressions, which establish or deny a particular chord as being the tonic chord. The cadence is held to be the sequence of chords which establishes one chord as being the tonic chord; more powerful cadences create a greater sense of closure and a stronger sense of key. Chords function by leading the music towards or away from a particular tonic chord. When the sense of which chord is the tonic is changed, the music is said to have "changed key" or "modulated". Roman numerals and numbers are used to describe the relationship of a particular chord to the tonic chord.^{[citation needed]}

The techniques of accomplishing this process are the subject of tonal music theory and compositional practice.

History and theory

18th century

Jean-Philippe Rameau's Treatise on Harmony (1722) is the earliest effort to explain tonal harmony through a coherent system based on acoustical principles (Girdlestone 1969, 520), built upon the functional unit being the triad, with inversions.

18th-century musical repertoire is commonly studied for the characteristic harmonic progressions, voice-leading, and forms associated with 'early' tonal music. In 21st-century American^{[clarification needed]} music theory pedagogy, Bach's four-part harmonizations of preexisting chorale tunes are canonical examples of Baroque harmonic practice. Students of music theory may be called upon to harmonize these same chorale tunes in the language of J. S. Bach, demonstrating their understanding of his harmonic language by replicating it themselves.^{[citation needed]}

19th century

The term "tonalité" (tonality) was first used in 1810 by Alexandre Choron in the preface "Sommaire de l'histoire de la musique" (Brown 2005, xiii) to the "Dictionnaire historique des musiciens artistes et amateurs" (which he published in collaboration with François-Joseph-Marie Fayolle) to describe the arrangement of the dominant and subdominant above and below the tonic—a constellation that had been made familiar by Rameau. According to Choron, this pattern, which he called tonalité moderne, distinguished modern music's harmonic organization from that of earlier [pre 17th century] music, including "tonalité des Grecs" (ancient Greek modes) and "tonalité ecclésiastique" (plainchant) (Choron 1810, xxxvii–xl; Hyer 2001). According to Choron, the beginnings of this modern tonality are found in the music of Claudio Monteverdi around the year 1595, but it was more than a century later that the full application of tonal harmony finally supplanted the older reliance on the melodic orientation of the church modes, in the music of the Neapolitan School—most especially that of Francesco Durante (Choron 1810, xxxviii, xl).

François-Joseph Fétis developed the concept of tonalité in the 1830s and 1840s (Brown 2005, xiii), finally codifying his theory of tonality in 1844, in his Traité complet de la théorie et de la pratique de l'harmonie (Hyer 2001; Wangermée and Ellis 2001). Fétis saw tonalité moderne as the historically evolving phenomenon with three stages: tonality of ordre transitonique ("transitonic order"), of ordre pluritonique ("pluritonic order") and, finally, ordre omnitonique ("omnitonic order"). The "transitonic" phase of tonality he connected with the late Monteverdi. He described his earliest example of tonalité moderne thus: "In the passage quoted here from Monteverdi's madrigal (Cruda amarilli, mm. 9–19 and 24–30), one sees a tonality determined by the accord parfait [root position major chord] on the tonic, by the sixth chord assigned to the chords on the third and seventh degrees of the scale, by the optional choice of the accord parfait or the sixth chord on the sixth degree, and finally, by the accord parfait and, above all, by the unprepared seventh chord (with major third) on the dominant" (Fétis 1844, 171). Among most subtle representatives of "pluritonic order" there were Mozart and Rossini; this stage he saw as the culmination and perfection of tonalité moderne. The romantic tonality of Berlioz and especially Wagner he related to "omnitonic order" with its "insatiable desire for modulation" (Hyer 2002, 748). His prophetic vision of the omnitonic order (though he didn't approve it personally) as the way of further development of tonality was a remarkable innovation to historic and theoretic concepts of the 19th century (Simms 1975, 132).

Tonalité ancienne Fetis described as tonality of ordre unitonique (establishing one key and remaining in that key for the duration of the piece). The principal example of this "unitonic order" tonality he saw in the Western plainchant.

Fétis believed that tonality, tonalité moderne, was entirely cultural, saying, "For the elements of music, nature provides nothing but a multitude of tones differing in pitch, duration, and intensity by the greater or least degree ... The conception of the relationships that exist among them is awakened in the intellect, and, by the action of sensitivity on the one hand, and will on the other, the mind coordinates the tones into different series, each of which corresponds to a particular class of emotions, sentiments, and ideas. Hence these series become various types of tonalities" (Fétis 1844, 11–12). "But one will say, 'What is the principle behind these scales, and what, if not acoustic phenomena and the laws of mathematics, has set the order of their tones?' I respond that this principle is purely metaphysical [anthropological]. We conceive this order and the melodic and harmonic phenomena that spring from it out of our conformation and education" (Fétis 1844, 249).

Fétis' "Traité complet" was very popular. In France alone the book was printed between 1844 and 1903 twenty times. The 1st edition was printed in Paris and Brussels in 1844, the 9th edition was printed in Paris in 1864, and the 20th edition was printed in Paris in 1903. For more bibliographical information, see worldcat.org.

In contrast, Hugo Riemann believed tonality, "affinities between tones" or Tonverwandtschaften, was entirely natural and, following Moritz Hauptmann (1853), that the major third and perfect fifth were the only "directly intelligible" intervals, and that I, IV, and V, the tonic, subdominant, and dominant were related by the perfect fifths between their root notes (Dahlhaus 1990, 101–02).

By the 1840s, the practice of harmony had expanded to include more chromatic notes and a wider chord vocabulary, particularly the more frequent use of the diminished-seventh chord—a four-note chord of all minor thirds.^{[citation needed]} It is in this era that the word tonality was popularized by Fétis (Wangermée and Ellis 2001). At the same time, the elaboration of both the fugue and the sonata form, in terms of key relationships, became more rigorous, and the study of harmonic progressions, voice leading, and ambiguity of key, more precise.^{[citation needed]}

Theorists such as Hugo Riemann, and later Edward Lowinsky and others, pushed back the date at which modern tonality began, and the cadence began to be seen as the definitive way that a tonality is established in a work of music (Judd, 1998).

In the music of some late-Romantic or post-Romantic composers such as Richard Wagner, Hugo Wolf, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Anton Bruckner, Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, Alexander Skryabin, and others, we find a variety of harmonic and linear procedures that have the effect of weakening functional tonality. These procedures may produce a suspension of tonality or may create a sense of tonal ambiguity, even to the point that at times the sense of tonality is completely lost.^{[citation needed]}

20th century

Tonality may be considered generally, with no restrictions on the date or place the music was produced, and little restriction on the materials and methods used. This definition includes pre-17th century western music, as well as much non-western music. By the middle of the 20th century, it had become "evident that triadic structure does not necessarily generate a tone center, that non-triadic harmonic formations may be made to function as referential elements, and that the assumption of a twelve-tone complex does not preclude the existence of tone centers" (Perle 1991, 8).

In the early 20th century, the tonality which had prevailed since the 17th century was seen to have reached a crisis or break down point. Because of the "increased use of the ambiguous chords, the less probable harmonic progressions, and the more unusual melodic and rhythmic inflections" (Meyer 1967, 241), the syntax of functional harmony was loosened to the point where "At best, the felt probabilities of the style system had become obscure; at worst, they were approaching a uniformity which provided few guides for either composition or listening" (Meyer 1967, 241).

Alfred Einstein wrote that in ancient China, "the development from the non-semitonal pentatonic to the seven-note scale is certainly traceable, even though the old pentatonic always remained the foundation of its music" (Einstein 1954, 7). He notes a similar development in ancient Japan and Java.

Theoretical underpinnings

Tonality allows for a great range of musical materials, structures, meanings, and understandings. It does this through establishing a tonic, or central chord, based on the lowest pitch, or degree, of a scale, and using a somewhat flexible network of relations between any pitch or chord and the tonic, similar to perspective in painting.

As within a musical phrase, interest and tension may be created through the move from consonance to dissonance and back. A larger piece will also create interest by moving away from and back to the tonic, and tension by destabilizing and re-establishing the key. Temporary secondary tonal centers may be established by cadences, or simply passed through in a process called modulation, while simultaneous tonal centers may be established through polytonality. Additionally, the structure of these features and processes may be linear, cyclical, or both. This allows for a huge variety of relations to be expressed through consonance and dissonance, distance or proximity to the tonic, the establishment of temporary or secondary tonal centers, and ambiguity as to tonal center.^{[citation needed]}

Tonal music presupposes that notes spaced over several octaves function the same way as if they were played in one octave, or octave equivalency. Tonal music also assumes that chords within the scale have harmonic implication / functionality. Since tonality is based on the relationship of scale degrees, there is not enharmonic equivalency. For example, in C major, the notes C♯ and D♭ are not equivalent. C♯ is the raised tonic, ♯, and D♭ is the lowered supertonic ♭. This is because, as stated in the introduction, the hierarchy of tonality is based on the relationship[s] between scale degrees, ♯ not being ♭.^{[citation needed]}

Though modulation may occur instantaneously without indication or preparation, the least ambiguous way to establish a new tonal center is through a cadence, a succession of two or more chords which ends a section, gives a feeling of [temporary] closure or finality, or both. Traditionally, cadences act both harmonically, to establish tonal centers, and formally, to articulate the end of sections. Just as the tonic triad is harmonically central, a dominant-tonic cadence is structurally central. The strongest cadential structure is the perfect authentic cadence, progressing from the dominant chord to the tonic chord. Historically, from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, the common practice period, this has been the basis of the dominant-tonic relationship.^{[citation needed]}

Common practice placed a great deal of emphasis on the correct use of cadences to structure music, and cadences were placed precisely to define the sections of a work. However, such strict use of cadences gradually gave way to more complex procedures where whole families of chords were used to imply particular distance from the tonal center. Composers, beginning in the mid 18th century, began using chords such as the Neapolitan, French or Italian Sixth. These temporarily suspended a sense of mode, and by freely changing between the major and minor voicing for the tonic chord, they made the listener unsure of whether the music was major or minor. There was also a gradual increase in the use of notes which were not part of the basic seven notes, called chromaticism, culminating in post-Wagnerian music such as that by Mahler and Strauss.^{[citation needed]}

One area of disagreement going back to the origin of the term tonality is whether tonality is natural or inherent in acoustical phenomena, whether it is inherent in the human nervous system or a psychological construct, whether it is inborn or learned, and to what degree it is all these things (Meyer 1967, 236). A viewpoint held by many theorists since the third quarter of the 19th century, following the publication in 1862 of the first edition of Helmholtz's On the Sensation of Tone (Helmholtz 1877), holds that diatonic scales and tonality arise from natural overtones (Riemann 1872, 1875, 1882, 1893, 1905, 1914–15; Schenker 1906–35; Hindemith 1937–70). The disagreement arises because if tonality were "natural", it would have appeared in other cultures [eg China, South Asia, Persia etc], and in western music before 1590.^{[citation needed]}

Rudolph Réti differentiates between harmonic tonality of the traditional kind found in homophony, and melodic tonality, as in monophony. In the harmonic kind, tonality is produced through the V-I chord progression, <d> <t>. He argues that in the progression I-x-V-I (and all progressions), V-I is the only step "which as such produces the effect of tonality," and that all other chord successions, diatonic or not, being more or less similar to the tonic-dominant, are "the composer's free invention." He describes melodic tonality (the term coined independently and 10 years earlier by Estonian composer Jaan Soonvald (Rais 1992, 46)) as being "entirely different from the classical type," wherein, "the whole line is to be understood as a musical unit mainly through its relationship to this basic note [the tonic]," this note not always being the tonic as interpreted according to harmonic tonality. His examples are ancient Jewish and Gregorian chant and other Eastern music, and he points out how these melodies often may be interrupted at any point and returned to the tonic, yet harmonically tonal melodies, such as that from Mozart's The Magic Flute below, are actually "strict harmonic-rhythmic pattern[s]," and include many points "from which it is impossible, that is, illogical, unless we want to destroy the innermost sense of the whole line" to return to the tonic (Reti 1958).^{[page needed]}

Play normally and compare with impossible return after B♮

x = return to tonic near inevitable

ⓧ (circled x) = possible but not inevitable

circle = impossible

(Reti 1958, ^{[page needed]})

Consequently, he argues, melodically tonal melodies resist harmonization and only reemerge in western music after, "harmonic tonality was abandoned," as in the music of Claude Debussy: "melodic tonality plus modulation is [Debussy's] modern tonality" (Reti 1958, 23).

Tonality outside common-practice period

The noun "tonality" and adjective "tonal" are widely applied also, in studies of early Western music and in non-Western traditional music (Arabic maqam, Indian raga, Indonesian slendro etc.), to the "systematic arrangements of pitch phenomena and relations between them" (Hyer 2001; Hyer 2002). Harold Powers, in a series of articles, used the phrase "sixteenth-century tonalities" (Powers 1981, 439; Powers 1992, 12; Powers 1996, 221). He borrowed German "Tonartentyp" from Siegfried Hermelink (who related it to Palestrina, see Hermelink 1960), translated it into English as "tonal type" (Powers 1981, 439), and systematically applied the concept of "tonal types" (in contrast to "tonality") to Renaissance polyphony. Cristle Collins Judd (the author of many articles and a thesis dedicated to the early pitch systems) found "tonalities" in this sense in motets of Josquin Desprez (Judd 1992). Judd also wrote of "chant-based tonality" (Judd 1998c), meaning "tonal" polyphonic compositions based on plainchant. Peter Lefferts found "tonal types" in the French polyphonic chanson of the 14th century (Lefferts 1995), Italian musicologists Marco Mangani and Daniele Sabaino in the late Renaissance music (Mangani and Sabaino 2008), and so on. The wide usage of "tonality" and "tonal" has been supported by several other musicologists (of diverse provenance); it can be traced, e.g., in the articles collected in Judd 1998a.

A possible reason for this broader usage of terms "tonality" and "tonal" is the attempt to translate German "Tonart" as "tonality" and "Tonarten-" prefix as "tonal" (for example, it is rendered so in the seminal New Grove article "Mode", Powers et al. 2001, §V, 1 et passim). Therefore, two different German words "Tonart" and "Tonalität" have sometimes been translated as "tonality" although they are not the same words in German.

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External links

Music Fundamentals: Tonal Music PDF
Tonal Harmony Reference Materials for the Undergraduate Theory Student
Tonality, Modality, and Atonality by Larry Solomon
Basic guide to tonal theory
The Tonal Centre "explains and demonstrates some of the key concepts of tonality"
Algebra of Tonal Functions.
Mapping Tonal Harmony