Tonality 1900–1950

Perspectives of New Music, 2015

Organized Sound. Klang und Wahrnehmung in der Musik des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts (musik.theorien der gegenwart 6), hrsg. von Christian Utz, Saarbrücken: Pfau 2013, 11–46, 2013

A short perception-based analysis of Helmut Lachenmann’s Pression for cellist (1969/70) serves as point of departure for a general discussion of sound and perception as key methodological elements in the analysis and interpretation of post-tonal music and in their historical implications. Diverse perception strategies are applied to Pression: an »architectural« strategy, based on cross-references between salient cues in the sound surface, a transformation-oriented strategy, based on »categorical transformation« between noise and pitch, and strategies that emerge from the experience of presence and aspects of performance practice. From this analytical sketch emerges a provisional threefold definition of sound which tentatively suggests (1) that the term includes the entire spectrum between isolated sine waves and unpitched noises of maximal spectral complexity, (2) that there is no viable distinction between musical and non-musical sounds as it is not the property of an acoustic event, but only our interpretation of it that makes it part of a »musical« or »non-musical« context, and (3) that, consequently, our perception has the capacity to »organize« any acoustic event into a »sound«. Such a »liberal« and context-oriented definition motivates a historical review of the concept of sound and related perception theories since the late eighteenth century. Sound has been a prominent »Other« in nineteenth-century music theory and aesthetics, disciplined mainly by »form«, »structure«, or »logic«, supported by eye- and architecture-related metaphorical language. An early emancipation of sound, in contrast, was articulated through ear- and »wave«- or »stream«-related metaphors that profoundly influenced modernist music aesthetics (Herder, Richard Wagner). Facets of this discourse can be traced to the association of sound with the world of the unconscious and suppressed emotions as well as the discussion about the concealment or disclosure of a sound’s source. This debate expanded well into the later twentieth century including criticism of Wagner’s »objective sound« (Adorno), theories of »acousmatic listening« (Schaeffer, Scruton), »musique concrète instrumentale« (Lachenmann), and the twofold model of »hearing-in« (Hamilton). Music theory has yet to cope with the emancipation of sound as a primary category in the twentieth century as it was, and in part still is, limited by the persistence of a hierarchical »surface-depth metaphor« that places (sub-)structural relationships above »surface events«. The morphosyntactic analytical methodology, developed as part of the research project A Context-Sensitive Theory of Post-Tonal Sound Organization (University of Music and Performing Arts Graz, 2012–2014), in contrast, aims to place a bodily-perceptual experience of sound events at the centre of analytical attention, based on three principal preliminaries: (1) the theory assigns a prominent role to the interaction of morphological (Gestalt-oriented) and syntactic (time-oriented) perceptual processes based on syntactic archetypes (tension/release, call/response, presence etc.); (2) it does not idealize a particular listening strategy, but aims at a multiplicity of perception modes that provide the basis for »performative listening«; (3) it understands musical perception as an interaction of cognitive factors and social construction with a particular focus on the relevance of everyday perception. A concluding analytical sketch aims to demonstrate the interaction of the archetypes »tension/release« and »presence«. A short morphosyntactic analysis of the third movement from Giacinto Scelsi’s I Presagi (1958) demonstrates how the »flat«, non-hierarchical absence of a conventional »event structure«, provoking the perception of a timeless presence of sound, is juxtaposed with a breath-like, ritualistic phrase arching, suggesting a contemplative experience of sound transformed in time. »Performative listening« might be defined as a mode of perception that (consciously or intuitively) oscillates between such juxtaposed archetypes, allowing for an integration of a broad spectrum of meanings, associations, and emotions.

Routledge, 2020

From Debussy to this early 21st century, sound has become one of the major wagers of music. Music had begun a change of paradigm, going from a culture centred on the note to a culture of sound. It could be wagered that this radical change is at least as founding as the revolution that gave birth to tonality. The emergence of sound in music happened through six parallel histories: timbre, which became a central category of composition; noise and the exploration of its musical potential; listening, with awareness having opened up to sound in itself; the increasingly intensive immersion in sound; the substitution of the composition of sound for composition with sounds; and space, which is increasingly thought of as ‘composable’. It is in crossing, combining and converging that these histories have ended up provoking this paradigmatical change. The book proposes a synthesis, one of the first of its kind, since its ambition is to delimit the emergence of sound systematically and globally. It sometimes refers to little-known or unknown musical works next to others more frequently mentioned by musicologists and music lovers. It also seeks a balance between sections comprising analytical developments and others of a more synthetic nature – it hopes to address the general public and specialists alike.

Current Musicology, 1997

Reviewed by Marilyn Nonken Music Theory In Concept and Practice is a seventieth-birthday tribute to Allen Forte, a theorist of unprecedented influence. Its editors claim that "in the modern rise of music theory. .. no single individual has been more central" (6). If this is an exaggeration, it is only a slight one. In addition to authoring landmark works (including Tonal Theory in Concept and Practice and The Structure of Atonal Music), Forte has also been an active and motivating presence in the field: as the editor who ushered the Journal of Music Theory through its transition from a fledgling publication to one of prominence; as a catalyst behind the foundation of the Society for Music Theory; and as a guiding force whose efforts resulted in the establishment of the doctoral program in music theory at Yale, the first of its kind at a major American institution. As depicted by Jonathan Bernard in the first of nineteen essays in this collection, Forte stands as heir to a tradition of musical inquiry that extends to the earliest decades of the century. With contributions by scholars on a wide variety of topics, this volume cannily evidences the transforming effect of one scholar's work on the discipline. Music Theory in Concept and Practice is divided into two broad categories ("Historical and Theoretical Essays" and "Analytical Studies"), then further divided into four subsections. The essays are categorized according to their musicological orientfltion ("Historical Perspectives" and "Theoretical Perspectives"), and the analyses to the repertoire they treat ("The Tonal Repertoire" and "Twentieth-Century Music"). The reader is warned that these divisions are by no means airtight. Works treating twentieth-century music, for example, are commonly found in other sections. Robert Morris's analysis ofVarese's Octandre is located in "Theoretical Perspectives," while Arnold Whittall's study on Carter and Birtwistle is found in "Historical Perspectives." The analyses are rarely lacking historical and theoretical comment, nor are the predominantly historical essays lacking analytical components. To their advantage, many essays in this collection ignore these distinctions. The best of them attain the fusion of historical, theoretical, and analytical thought, providing the reader a richer understanding of history, a firmer grasp of some of the issues surrounding music composition and scholarship, and an enlightened conception of the notes on the page. Because several studies will thus be of interest to historical

Technology understood as the application of knowledge for practical purposes has become an inseparable part of almost every human activity. Also music, at least some of its elements, can be understood as a specific communicative technology since the knowledge of sounds’ emotionality is often intentionally applied in music in order to manipulate human moods. Perhaps the best contemporary example of such an application is film music. One music feature which is used to elicit emotions is tonality. In every tonal hierarchy some pitch classes are perceived as more stable than others. The application of such a hierarchy in music leads to listeners’ feelings of tensions and relaxations. These feelings are elicited by the pitch classes which occurred in the particular pitch contexts. Most probably, these emotional assessments are the results of listeners’ predictions based on the statistical occurrence of pitches in music which has been listened to. Thus, an implicit knowledge of pitch statistics allows composers to intentionally manipulate pitch structure so that the listeners experience tensions and relaxations. The aim of the paper is to indicate that tonality is based on two aspects (adaptive and technological) which are the results of the cultural-genetic coevolution. The former is based on some inborn predispositions to couple three separate mental mechanisms i.e. a statistical analysis of pitch classes’ occurrence, an emotional assessment of predicted stimuli, and working memory. The latter consists in manipulation of pitch classes in a culturally-specific way. However, the technological aspect has been needed to the evolution of the aforesaid predispositions. Thus, the evolution of the abilities to recognize tonal relations has been possible thanks to Baldwin effect. From this point of view, the technological aspect of tonality has become an important element of the cultural environment which has played a selective role in the evolution of human musicality.

From the seventeenth century to the present day, tonal harmonic music has had a number of invariant properties such as the use of specific chord progressions (cadences) to induce a sense of closure, the asymmetrical privileging of certain progressions, and the privileging of the major and minor scales. The most widely accepted explanation has been that this is due to a process of enculturation: frequently occurring musical patterns are learned by listeners, some of whom become composers and replicate the same patterns, which go on to influence the next “generation” of composers, and so on. In this paper, however, I present a possible psychoacoustic explanation for some important regularities of tonal-harmonic music. The core of the model is two different measures of pitch-based distance between chords. The first is voice-leading distance; the second is spectral pitch distance—a measure of the distance between the partials in one chord compared to those in another chord. I propose that when a pair of triads has a higher spectral distance than another pair of triads that is voice-leading-close, the former pair is heard as an alteration of the latter pair, and seeks resolution. I explore the extent to which this model can predict the familiar tonal cadences described in music theory (including those containing tritone substitutions), and the asymmetries that are so characteristic of tonal harmony. I also show how it may be able to shed light upon the privileged status of the major and minor scales (over the modes).

Ostium, 2016

Phenomenology, as a philosophy of the twentieth century, is often confronted with music of the same period, which in contrast with the classical-romantic repertoire recedes from previously codified means for the organisation of musical structure (namely tonality) and holds up the actual matter of the music – sound – for admiration. So musical experience dwells more at the sound and its direct appearance rather than rushing to the musical meanings intended through sensuous moments. From this aspect music in the first decades of the twentieth century complemented the other arts undergoing a similar development. Romantic art was replaced by artistic creativity relying on the objectivity of the musical material and not on the emotional quality. The paper considers circumstances under which some of the phenomenological approaches adopt a positive approach to the music of the twentieth century (those which stress the immediacy of the perceptive presence) and some of which tend to reject it (those which apply the requirement of expressive intentionality). Stratilková, Martina. “Sound or Expression: Dilemmas in the Phenomenological Aesthetics of 20th Century Music.” Ostium 12, 2016(4). The article can be accessed on the journal website: http://www.ostium.sk/sk/sound-or-expression-dilemmas-in-the-phenomenological-aesthetics-of-20th-century-music/

2009

1 Cf. Khaled S. Pascha, ‘Gefrorene Musik’. Das Verhältnis von Architektur und Musik in der ästhetischen Theorie, proefschrift Technische Universität Berlijn, 2004. 2 Hermann L.F. von Helmholtz, On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music, 2e Engelse druk, vertaald, grondig herzien en gecorrigeerd en aangepast aan de vierde Duitse druk van 1877 door Alexander J. Ellis, New York, 1954 (= herdr. Londen, 1885), p. 370. Vertaling van: Lehre von den Tonempfindungen als Physiologische Grundlage für die Theorie der Musik, 1863.

Musicology, 2016

In this article I analyse the context and features of resemantized tonality, historically linked with the first half of the 20 th century. The renewed interest in tonality occurred after the crisis of tonality-the system that prevailed in music until its 'collapse' in the late 19 th and early 20 th century. The consequence of the crisis was the emergence of atonality, as well as different tonal idioms which are here collectively referred to as "resemantized tonality". This reaction led to a whole series of works based on the concept of linguistic-stylistic resemantization in the context of modernist expression. I will discuss some of the basic characteristics and linguistic strategies of the resemantized tonality that have established it as an autochthonous linguistic-grammatical system. Furthermore, I will analyse two highly illustrative works: Sergei Prokofiev's Symphony No. 1 Classical and Paul Hindemith's cycle of solo songs The Life of Virgin Mary.

Atmosphere and Aesthetics. A Plural Perspective. ed. by Tonino Griffero & Marco Tededsci, 2019