Tonality
Tonality is the arrangement of pitches and/or chords of a musical work in a hierarchy of perceived relations, stabilities, attractions, and directionality. In this hierarchy the single pitch or triad with the greatest stability is called the tonic. The root of the tonic triad forms the name given to the key, so in the key of C major the tone C can be both the tonic of the scale and the root of the tonic triad. The tonic can be a different tone in the same scale, when the work is said to be in one of the modes of the scale.[2]
This article is about the musical system. For linguistic feature, see tone (linguistics). For tone colour, see timbre. For use of this term in photography, see tonal range.
Simple folk music songs often start and end with the tonic note. The most common use of the term "is to designate the arrangement of musical phenomena around a referential tonic in European music from about 1600 to about 1910".[3] Contemporary classical music from 1910 to the 2000s may practice or avoid any sort of tonality—but harmony in almost all Western popular music remains tonal. Harmony in jazz includes many but not all tonal characteristics of the European common practice period, usually known as "classical music".
"All harmonic idioms in popular music are tonal, and none is without function."[4] Tonality is an organized system of tones (e.g., the tones of a major or minor scale) in which one tone (the tonic) becomes the central point for the remaining tones. The other tones in a tonal piece are all defined in terms of their relationship to the tonic. In tonality, the tonic (tonal center) is the tone of complete relaxation and stability, the target toward which other tones lead.[5] The cadence (a rest point) in which the dominant chord or dominant seventh chord resolves to the tonic chord plays an important role in establishing the tonality of a piece. "Tonal music is music that is unified and dimensional. Music is unified if it is exhaustively referable to a precompositional system generated by a single constructive principle derived from a basic scale-type; it is dimensional if it can nonetheless be distinguished from that precompositional ordering".[6]
The term tonalité originated with Alexandre-Étienne Choron[7] and was borrowed by François-Joseph Fétis in 1840.[8] According to Carl Dahlhaus, however, the term tonalité was only coined by Castil-Blaze in 1821.[9] 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. Major-minor tonality is also called harmonic tonality (in the title of Carl Dahlhaus,[10] translating the German harmonische Tonalität), diatonic tonality, common practice tonality, functional tonality, or just tonality.
History and theory[edit]
18th century[edit]
Jean-Philippe Rameau's Treatise on Harmony (1722) is the earliest effort to explain tonal harmony through a coherent system based on acoustical principles,[25] built upon the functional unit being the triad, with inversions.
19th century[edit]
The term tonalité (tonality) was first used in 1810 by Alexandre Choron in the preface Sommaire de l'histoire de la musique[26] 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).[27] 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.[28]
François-Joseph Fétis developed the concept of tonalité in the 1830s and 1840s,[26] finally codifying his theory of tonality in 1844, in his Traité complet de la théorie et de la pratique de l'harmonie.[29] 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".[30] 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".[31] 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.[32]
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."[33] "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."[34]
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,[35] and the 20th edition was printed in Paris in 1903.
In contrast, Hugo Riemann believed tonality, "affinities between tones" or Tonverwandtschaften, was entirely natural and, following Moritz Hauptmann,[36] 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.[37]
It is in this era that the word tonality was popularized by Fétis.[38]
Theorists such as Hugo Riemann, and later Edward Lowinsky[39] and others, pushed back the date when modern tonality began, and the cadence began to be seen as the definitive way that a tonality is established in a work of music.[40]
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 Scriabin, 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. Schoenberg described this kind of tonality (with references to the music of Wagner, Mahler, and himself, amongst others) as "aufgehobene Tonalität" and "schwebende Tonalität",[41] usually rendered in English as "suspended" ("not in effect", "cancelled") tonality and "fluctuating" ("suspended", "not yet decided") tonality, respectively.[42]
20th century[edit]
In the early 20th century, the tonality that 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,"[43] the syntax of functional harmony 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."[43]
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".[11] For the composer and theorist George Perle, tonality is not "a matter of 'tone-centeredness', whether based on a 'natural' hierarchy of pitches derived from the overtone series or an 'artificial' pre compositional ordering of the pitch material; nor is it essentially connected to the kinds of pitch structures one finds in traditional diatonic music".[12]
Computational methods to determine the key[edit]
In music information retrieval, techniques have been developed to determine the key of a piece of classical Western music (recorded in audio data format) automatically. These methods are often based on a compressed representation of the pitch content in a 12-dimensional pitch-class profile (chromagram) and a subsequent procedure that finds the best match between this representation and one of the prototype vectors of the 24 minor and major keys.[69] For implementation, often the constant-Q transform is used, displaying the musical signal on a log frequency scale. Although a radical (over)simplification of the concept of tonality, such methods can predict the key of classical Western music well for most pieces. Other methods also take into consideration the sequentiality of music.