I know we’re long past the days of the mid-20th century, when serialism and high modernism reigned in the American academy. Yet, despite the academy’s relatively more recent embracing of minimalism and post-modernism, you still run into people here and there who suggest that there’s no place for tonality in the art music of today.
I once presented a jazz-inspired piece in a masterclass with a European composer. He was baffled by my presentation, saying that he couldn’t understand why Americans were still working with the same harmonic materials.
I admit that I do tend, most of the time, to work with “tonal” materials. I don’t mean this in the sense that all of my music is structured on IV-V-I relationships, but rather that my music tends to have varying harmonic material that is based around either one tonal center or multiple tonal centers. I find this satisfying, because the result often references tonality, while also creating ambiguities or idiosyncrasies that you wouldn’t find in a straight-laced tonal piece.
*Some context for our non-theoretical readers: One of the main iconic tonal composers is Mozart, whose harmonies and cadences are incredibly functional and clear. While many composers in the 20th century are not “tonal” composers in this sense, they still often use material based on tonal centers (this is true of much of Bartók and Stravinsky’s music, including The Rite of Spring (excerpt below).
So is it a bad thing to still be using tonal materials?
I could throw it all to the wind and just try to write the wackiest things I can think of for the sake of conceptual art. But at the moment I really and truly want to learn how to master the art of harmony as much as I can. Too often I feel disappointed when I hear new music pieces that fail to move their audiences or to create a truly lasting impression either intellectually or emotionally, despite potentially having complex rhythmic ideas, imaginative extended techniques, a rich understanding of gesture, or conceptual freshness. Sometimes big musical gestures and ideas end up sounding hollow without some kind of harmonic support or logical (or purposefully illogical) harmonic motion.
Obviously there are countless living composers who have mastered all of the above. And something tells me that these people—people who are often incredibly successful composers (John Adams and Jennifer Higdon, among many, many others)—really know the ins and outs of traditional, functional harmony, whether they use it or not (and, more often than not, they do).
That said, however, there are also countless composers who have mastered the craft of composition (in very successful and imaginative ways) without emphasizing traditional harmonic language, which is why schools and individuals are sometimes more hesitant than they used to be about really ramming harmonic studies down our throats.
So my question to all of you is, what role does/should tonality have in today’s art music?
Posted by Natalie
But what are the limits of 'tonal'? What does it mean to understand harmony, and function? They never really spoke about sound itself in any of my undergrad theory classes. If we're still going to use only 12 pitches, it's only going to get increasingly harder to create something that isn't just a reworking of something else. My approach has been to try and understand the physics behind the progressions of harmony, and how the ear (my ear at least) really wants to be moved. It's a redefining of tension and resolution, but within meaningful terminology according to the physical interaction of the sound waves in question.
ReplyDeleteThis is all thrown out of the window when dealing within the 12-tet system - we're just supposed to agree that certain chords and intervals are consonant and others dissonant, and ignore the roughness, when there are clearly degrees of consonance along a continuum that goes all the way to noise. It's an unfortunate approximation that I feel takes much away from the listening experience, by ignoring basic aspects of sound.
Also, within the 12-tet system there are such a limited number of distances and 'consonant' movements, and if we think in terms of 'just' intervals we can explore many uncharted areas that may even include more consonance, or at least different consonances- now thought of as degrees of harmonicity. We can still employ function, and create harmonic relations within these 'just' interval complexes that are even smoother, or rougher, and relations between sounds/chords can be made even more clearly when we have a finer control of the intervallic distances.
It all boils down to these relations in tonal music, right? The ear interprets certain movements as resolution because of the tension set up by the previous chord, and our history of wanting these specific movements because we've heard them so many times, (a teacher of mine would argue there's a hierarchy set up here), but there are so many more 'resolutions' to be made outside of this system!
I feel the need to be able to go absolutely anywhere within my harmonic structures, only limited by the types of relations I want to make between frequency groups.
So much music is microtonal anyway, and we just don't hear it as such, instead getting bogged down in its notation, which is often misleading.
I think studying the harmonies of sound itself is the way to master harmony in any system.
-Ryan Pratt
Thanks, Ryan! That's a very thoughtful and thorough response. I know you and I have talked about this topic before and I think it's an interesting discussion.
ReplyDeleteWhat you say makes a lot of sense to me. My argument for people still being open-minded to "tonal" composition is based on the idea that, as you have said, there is still SO much to be discovered within a "tonal" framework, or any framework that adheres in some fashion to the practical acoustics of sound. The possibilities are infinite. Obviously, as artists, we want to move forward, but I think that progress can be made both working inside the "tonal" world and outside of it.
And, also as you say, no matter what we do as composers, gaining an understanding of the harmonies and acoustics of sound itself is definitely an incredibly important aspect of understanding the ins and outs of writing music.
Thanks again, and hope you'll keep reading!!
--Natalie