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Tonality is the arrangement of pitches and/or
chords Chord may refer to: * Chord (music), an aggregate of musical pitches sounded simultaneously ** Guitar chord a chord played on a guitar, which has a particular tuning * Chord (geometry), a line segment joining two points on a curve * Chord ( ...
of a musical work in a hierarchy of perceived relations, stabilities, attractions and directionality. In this hierarchy, the single pitch or triadic chord with the greatest stability is called the tonic. The
root In vascular plants, the roots are the organs of a plant that are modified to provide anchorage for the plant and take in water and nutrients into the plant body, which allows plants to grow taller and faster. They are most often below the su ...
of the tonic chord forms the name given to the key, so in the key of C major, the note C is both the tonic of the scale and the root of the tonic chord (which is C–E–G). Simple
folk music Folk music is a music genre that includes traditional folk music and the contemporary genre that evolved from the former during the 20th-century folk revival. Some types of folk music may be called world music. Traditional folk music has ...
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 The culture of Europe is rooted in its art, architecture, film, different types of music, economics, literature, and philosophy. European culture is largely rooted in what is often referred to as its "common cultural heritage". Definition ...
from about 1600 to about 1910".
Contemporary classical music Contemporary classical music is classical music composed close to the present day. At the beginning of the 21st century, it commonly referred to the post-1945 Modernism (music), modern forms of Post-tonal music theory, post-tonal music after th ...
from 1910 to the 2000s may practice or avoid any sort of tonality—but
harmony In music, harmony is the process by which individual sounds are joined together or composed into whole units or compositions. Often, the term harmony refers to simultaneously occurring frequencies, pitches ( tones, notes), or chords. Howeve ...
in almost all Western
popular music Popular music is music with wide appeal that is typically distributed to large audiences through the music industry. These forms and styles can be enjoyed and performed by people with little or no musical training.Popular Music. (2015). ''Fu ...
remains tonal. Harmony in
jazz Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with its roots in blues and ragtime. Since the 1920s Jazz Age, it has been recognized as a m ...
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." 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. The
cadence In Western musical theory, a cadence (Latin ''cadentia'', "a falling") is the end of a phrase in which the melody or harmony creates a sense of full or partial resolution, especially in music of the 16th century onwards.Don Michael Randel (199 ...
(coming to rest point) in which the dominant chord or
dominant seventh In music theory, a dominant seventh chord, or major minor seventh chord, is a seventh chord, usually built on the fifth degree of the major scale, and composed of a root, major third, perfect fifth, and minor seventh. Thus it is a major triad t ...
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". The term ''tonalité'' originated with Alexandre-Étienne Choron and was borrowed by
François-Joseph Fétis François-Joseph Fétis (; 25 March 1784 – 26 March 1871) was a Belgian musicologist, composer, teacher, and one of the most influential music critics of the 19th century. His enormous compilation of biographical data in the ''Biographie univer ...
in 1840. According to
Carl Dahlhaus Carl Dahlhaus (10 June 1928 – 13 March 1989) was a German musicologist who was among the leading postwar musicologists of the mid to late 20th-century. A prolific scholar, he had broad interests though his research focused on 19th- and 20th ...
, however, the term ''tonalité'' was only coined by
Castil-Blaze François-Henri-Joseph Blaze, known as Castil-Blaze (1 December 1784 – 11 December 1857), was a French musicologist, music critic, composer, and music editor. Biography Blaze was born and grew up in Cavaillon, Vaucluse. He went to Paris ...
in 1821. 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, translating the German ''harmonische Tonalität''), ''diatonic tonality'', ''common practice tonality'', ''functional tonality'', or just ''tonality''.


Characteristics and features

At least eight distinct senses of the word "tonality" (and corresponding adjective, "tonal"), some mutually exclusive, have been identified.


Systematic organization

The word tonality may describe any systematic organization of pitch phenomena in any music at all, including pre-17th century western music as well as much non-western music, such as music based on the
slendro Slendro ( jv, ꦱ꧀ꦭꦺꦤ꧀ꦢꦿꦺꦴ, ban, slendro, translit=Sléndro) ( su, salendro, translit=Saléndro) is one of the essential tuning systems used in gamelan instruments that have pentatonic scale. Based on Javanese mythology, ...
and
pelog Pelog ( su, ᮕᮦᮜᮧᮌ᮪, translit=Pélog /pelog/, jv, ꦥꦺꦭꦺꦴꦒ꧀, ban, ᬧᬾᬮᭀᬕ᭄, translit=Pélog /pelok/) is one of the essential tuning systems used in gamelan instruments that has heptatonic scale. The other ...
pitch collections of Indonesian
gamelan Gamelan () ( jv, ꦒꦩꦼꦭꦤ꧀, su, ᮌᮙᮨᮜᮔ᮪, ban, ᬕᬫᭂᬮᬦ᭄) is the traditional ensemble music of the Javanese, Sundanese, and Balinese peoples of Indonesia, made up predominantly of percussive instruments. T ...
, or employing the modal nuclei of the
Arabic maqam Arabic maqam ( ar, مقام, maqām, literally "rank"; ') is the system of melodic modes used in traditional Arabic music, which is mainly melodic. The word ''maqam'' in Arabic means place, location or position. The Arabic ''maqam'' is a mel ...
or the Indian
raga A ''raga'' or ''raag'' (; also ''raaga'' or ''ragam''; ) is a melodic framework for improvisation in Indian classical music akin to a melodic mode. The ''rāga'' is a unique and central feature of the classical Indian music tradition, and as ...
system. This sense also applies to the tonic/dominant/subdominant harmonic constellations in the theories of
Jean-Philippe Rameau Jean-Philippe Rameau (; – ) was a French composer and music theorist. Regarded as one of the most important French composers and music theorists of the 18th century, he replaced Jean-Baptiste Lully as the dominant composer of French opera and ...
as well as the 144 basic transformations of
twelve-tone technique The twelve-tone technique—also known as dodecaphony, twelve-tone serialism, and (in British usage) twelve-note composition—is a method of musical composition first devised by Austrian composer Josef Matthias Hauer, who published his "law o ...
. 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". For the composer and theorist
George Perle George Perle (6 May 1915 – 23 January 2009) was an American composer and music theorist. As a composer, his music was largely atonal, using methods similar to the twelve-tone technique of the Second Viennese School. This serialist style, and ...
, 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". This sense (like some of the others) is susceptible to ideological employment, as Schoenberg, did by relying on the idea of a progressive development in musical resources "to compress divergent ''fin-de-siècle'' compositional practices into a single historical lineage in which his own music brings one historical era to a close and begins the next." From this point of view, twelve-tone music could be regarded "either as the natural and inevitable culmination of an organic motivic process (
Webern Anton Friedrich Wilhelm von Webern (3 December 188315 September 1945), better known as Anton Webern (), was an Austrian composer and conductor whose music was among the most radical of its milieu in its sheer concision, even aphorism, and stead ...
) or as a historical ''Aufhebung'' ( Adorno), the dialectical synthesis of late Romantic motivic practice on the one hand with a musical sublimation of tonality as pure system on the other".


Theoretical arrangement of pitches

In another sense, tonality means any rational and self-contained theoretical arrangement of musical pitches, existing prior to any concrete embodiment in music. For example, "Sainsbury, who had Choron translated into English in 1825, rendered the first occurrence of tonalité as a 'system of modes' before matching it with the neologism 'tonality'. While tonality qua system constitutes a theoretical (and thus imaginative) abstraction from actual music, it is often hypostatized in musicological discourse, converted from a theoretical structure into a musical reality. In this sense, it is understood as a Platonic form or prediscursive musical essence that suffuses music with intelligible sense, which exists before its concrete embodiment in music, and can thus be theorized and discussed apart from actual musical contexts".


Contrast with modal and atonal systems

To contrast with " modal" and "
atonal Atonality in its broadest sense is music that lacks a tonal center, or key. ''Atonality'', in this sense, usually describes compositions written from about the early 20th-century to the present day, where a hierarchy of harmonies focusing on a s ...
", the term tonality is used to imply that tonal music is discontinuous as a form of cultural expression from modal music (before 1600) on the one hand and atonal music (after 1910) on the other.


Pre-modern concept

In some literature, tonality is a generic term applied to pre-modern music, referring to the eight modes of the Western church, implying that important historical continuities underlie music before and after the emergence of the common practice period around 1600, with the difference between ''tonalité ancienne'' (before 1600) and ''tonalité moderne'' (after 1600) being one of emphasis rather than of kind.


Referential tonic

In a general way, tonality can refer to a wide variety of musical phenomena (harmonies, cadential formulae, harmonic progressions, melodic gestures, formal categories) as arranged or understood in relation to a referential tonic.


Tonal theories

In a slightly different sense to the one above, tonality can also be used to refer to musical phenomena perceived or preinterpreted in terms of the categories of tonal theories. This is a psychophysical sense, where for example "listeners tend to hear a given pitch as, for instance, an A above middle C, an augmented 4th above E, the minor 3rd in an F minor triad, a dominant in relation to D, or (where the caret designates a scale degree) in G major rather than a mere acoustical frequency, in this case 440 Hz".


Synonym for "key"

The word tonality has more recently been used by amateur musicians and in
popular music Popular music is music with wide appeal that is typically distributed to large audiences through the music industry. These forms and styles can be enjoyed and performed by people with little or no musical training.Popular Music. (2015). ''Fu ...
as a synonym for " key"—in this sense meaning "keyness" This is the most common usage, referring to the arrangement of musical phenomena around a referential tonic, as found in European music from about 1600 to about 1910, using two modal genera,
major Major ( commandant in certain jurisdictions) is a military rank of commissioned officer status, with corresponding ranks existing in many military forces throughout the world. When used unhyphenated and in conjunction with no other indicato ...
and minor


Other perspectives

There is a loose assortment of ideas associated with the term. "Tonal harmonies must always include the third of the chord". In major and minor harmonies, the
perfect fifth In music theory, a perfect fifth is the musical interval corresponding to a pair of pitches with a frequency ratio of 3:2, or very nearly so. In classical music from Western culture, a fifth is the interval from the first to the last of five ...
is often implied and understood by the listener even if it is not present. To function as a tonic, a chord must be either a major or a minor triad. Dominant function requires a major-quality triad with a root a perfect fifth above the affiliated tonic and containing the leading tone of the key. This dominant triad must be preceded by a chord progression that establishes the dominant as the penultimate goal of a motion that is completed by moving on to the tonic. In this final dominant-to-tonic progression, the leading tone normally ascends by semitone motion to the tonic scale degree. A dominant seventh chord always consist of a major triad with an added minor seventh above the root. To achieve this in minor keys, the seventh scale degree must be raised to create a major triad on the dominant.
David Cope David Cope (born May 17, 1941 in San Francisco, California) is an American author, composer, scientist, and former professor of music at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). His primary area of research involves artificial intellige ...
considers key,
consonance and dissonance In music, consonance and dissonance are categorizations of simultaneous or successive sounds. Within the Western tradition, some listeners associate consonance with sweetness, pleasantness, and acceptability, and dissonance with harshness, unpl ...
(relaxation and tension, respectively), and hierarchical relationships the three most basic concepts in tonality. Carl Dahlhaus lists the characteristic schemata of tonal harmony, "typified in the compositional formulas of the 16th 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 In music theory, the circle of fifths is a way of organizing the 12 chromatic pitches as a sequence of perfect fifths. (This is strictly true in the standard 12-tone equal temperament system — using a different system requires one interval of ...
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.


Form


Consonance and dissonance

The consonance and dissonance of different intervals plays an important role in establishing the tonality of a piece or section in common practice music and
popular music Popular music is music with wide appeal that is typically distributed to large audiences through the music industry. These forms and styles can be enjoyed and performed by people with little or no musical training.Popular Music. (2015). ''Fu ...
. For example, for a simple
folk music Folk music is a music genre that includes traditional folk music and the contemporary genre that evolved from the former during the 20th-century folk revival. Some types of folk music may be called world music. Traditional folk music has ...
song in the key of C Major, almost all of the triadic chords in the song will be Major or minor chords which are stable and consonant (e.g., in the key of C Major, commonly-used chords include D minor, F Major, G Major, etc.). The most commonly used dissonant chord in a pop song context is the
dominant seventh In music theory, a dominant seventh chord, or major minor seventh chord, is a seventh chord, usually built on the fifth degree of the major scale, and composed of a root, major third, perfect fifth, and minor seventh. Thus it is a major triad t ...
chord built on the fifth scale degree; in the key of C Major, this would be a G dominant seventh chord, or G7 chord, which contains the pitches G, B, D and F. This dominant seventh chord contains a dissonant
tritone In music theory, the tritone is defined as a musical interval composed of three adjacent whole tones (six semitones). For instance, the interval from F up to the B above it (in short, F–B) is a tritone as it can be decomposed into the three adj ...
interval between the notes B and F. In pop music, the listener will expect this tritone to be resolved to a consonant, stable chord (in this case, typically a C Major
cadence In Western musical theory, a cadence (Latin ''cadentia'', "a falling") is the end of a phrase in which the melody or harmony creates a sense of full or partial resolution, especially in music of the 16th century onwards.Don Michael Randel (199 ...
(coming to rest point) or a
deceptive cadence In Western musical theory, a cadence (Latin ''cadentia'', "a falling") is the end of a phrase in which the melody or harmony creates a sense of full or partial resolution, especially in music of the 16th century onwards.Don Michael Randel (1999) ...
to an A minor chord).


Tonal musics

"The larger portion of the world's folk and art music can be categorized as tonal," as long as the definition is as follows: "Tonal music gives priority to a single tone or tonic. In this kind of music all the constituent tones and resulting tonal relationships are heard and identified relative to their tonic". In this sense, "All harmonic idioms in popular music are tonal, and none is without function". However, "within the continuing hegemony of tonality there is evidence for a relatively separate tradition of genuine folk musics, which do not operate completely or even mainly according to the assumptions or rules of tonality. … throughout the reign of tonality there seem to have existed subterranean folk musical traditions organized on principles different from tonality, and often modal: Celtic songs and blues are obvious examples". According to Allan Moore, "part of the heritage of rock lies within common-practice tonality" but, because the
leading-note In music theory, a leading-tone (also called a subsemitone, and a leading-note in the UK) is a note or pitch which resolves or "leads" to a note one semitone higher or lower, being a lower and upper leading-tone, respectively. Typically, ''the' ...
/tonic relationship is "axiomatic to the definition of common-practice tonality", and a fundamental feature of rock music's identity is the absence of a diatonic leading tone, the harmonic practices of rock music, "while sharing many features with classical tonality, are nonetheless distinct". Power chords are especially problematic when trying to apply classical functional tonality to certain varieties of popular music. Genres such as heavy metal, new wave, punk rock, and grunge music "took power chords into new arenas, often with a reduced emphasis on tonal function. These genres are often expressed in two parts—a bass line doubled in fifths, and a single vocal part. Power chord technique was often allied with modal procedure". Much jazz is tonal, but "functional tonality in jazz has different properties than that of common-practice classical music. These properties are represented by a unique set of rules dictating the unfolding of harmonic function, voice-leading conventions, and the overall behavior of chord tones and chordal extensions".


History and theory


18th century

Jean-Philippe Rameau Jean-Philippe Rameau (; – ) was a French composer and music theorist. Regarded as one of the most important French composers and music theorists of the 18th century, he replaced Jean-Baptiste Lully as the dominant composer of French opera and ...
's ''Treatise on Harmony'' (1722) is the earliest effort to explain tonal harmony through a coherent system based on acoustical principles, built upon the functional unit being the
triad Triad or triade may refer to: * a group of three Businesses and organisations * Triad (American fraternities), certain historic groupings of seminal college fraternities in North America * Triad (organized crime), a Chinese transnational orga ...
, with inversions.


19th century

The term ''tonalité'' (tonality) was first used in 1810 by Alexandre Choron in the preface ''Sommaire de l'histoire de la musique'' to the ''Dictionnaire historique des musiciens artistes et amateurs'' (which he published in collaboration with
François-Joseph-Marie Fayolle François-Joseph-Marie Fayolle (15 August 1774 - 2 December 1852) was a French writer on music, who was born in Paris and is known by his articles in connection with the '' Biographie Universelle'', having furnished the greater portion of the biog ...
) 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 re 17th centurymusic, including ''tonalité des Grecs'' (ancient Greek modes) and ''tonalité ecclésiastique'' (plainchant). According to Choron, the beginnings of this modern tonality are found in the music of
Claudio Monteverdi Claudio Giovanni Antonio Monteverdi (baptized 15 May 1567 – 29 November 1643) was an Italian composer, choirmaster and string player. A composer of both secular and sacred music, and a pioneer in the development of opera, he is consider ...
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. François-Joseph Fétis developed the concept of ''tonalité'' in the 1830s and 1840s, finally codifying his theory of tonality in 1844, in his ''Traité complet de la théorie et de la pratique de l'harmonie''. 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 Claudio Giovanni Antonio Monteverdi (baptized 15 May 1567 – 29 November 1643) was an Italian composer, choirmaster and string player. A composer of both secular and sacred music, and a pioneer in the development of opera, he is consider ...
. 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'' oot position major chordon 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". 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". 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. ''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." "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 nthropological We conceive this order and the melodic and harmonic phenomena that spring from it out of our conformation and education." 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. In contrast,
Hugo Riemann Karl Wilhelm Julius Hugo Riemann (18 July 1849 – 10 July 1919) was a German musicologist and composer who was among the founders of modern musicology. The leading European music scholar of his time, he was active and influential as both a mus ...
believed tonality, "affinities between tones" or ''Tonverwandtschaften'', was entirely natural and, following Moritz Hauptmann, 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. It is in this era that the word ''tonality'' was popularized by Fétis. Theorists such as Hugo Riemann, and later
Edward Lowinsky Edward Elias Lowinsky (January 12, 1908 – October 11, 1985) was an American musicologist. Lowinsky was one of the most prominent and influential musicologists in post-World War II America. His 1946 work on the "secret chromatic art" of Renaissan ...
and others, pushed back the date when modern tonality began, and the
cadence In Western musical theory, a cadence (Latin ''cadentia'', "a falling") is the end of a phrase in which the melody or harmony creates a sense of full or partial resolution, especially in music of the 16th century onwards.Don Michael Randel (199 ...
began to be seen as the definitive way that a tonality is established in a work of music. In the music of some late-Romantic or post-Romantic composers such as
Richard Wagner Wilhelm Richard Wagner ( ; ; 22 May 181313 February 1883) was a German composer, theatre director, polemicist, and conductor who is chiefly known for his operas (or, as some of his mature works were later known, "music dramas"). Unlike most op ...
,
Hugo Wolf Hugo Philipp Jacob Wolf (13 March 1860 – 22 February 1903) was an Austrian composer of Slovene origin, particularly noted for his art songs, or Lieder. He brought to this form a concentrated expressive intensity which was unique in late Ro ...
,
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky , group=n ( ; 7 May 1840 – 6 November 1893) was a Russian composer of the Romantic period. He was the first Russian composer whose music would make a lasting impression internationally. He wrote some of the most popu ...
,
Anton Bruckner Josef Anton Bruckner (; 4 September 182411 October 1896) was an Austrian composer, organist, and music theorist best known for his symphonies, masses, Te Deum and motets. The first are considered emblematic of the final stage of Austro-Ger ...
,
Gustav Mahler Gustav Mahler (; 7 July 1860 – 18 May 1911) was an Austro-Bohemian Romantic composer, and one of the leading conductors of his generation. As a composer he acted as a bridge between the 19th-century Austro-German tradition and the modernism ...
,
Richard Strauss Richard Georg Strauss (; 11 June 1864 – 8 September 1949) was a German composer, conductor, pianist, and violinist. Considered a leading composer of the late Romantic and early modern eras, he has been described as a successor of Richard Wag ...
,
Alexander Scriabin Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin (; russian: Александр Николаевич Скрябин ; – ) was a Russian composer and virtuoso pianist. Before 1903, Scriabin was greatly influenced by the music of Frédéric Chopin and composed ...
, 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 Arnold Schoenberg or Schönberg (, ; ; 13 September 187413 July 1951) was an Austrian-American composer, music theorist, teacher, writer, and painter. He is widely considered one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. He was as ...
described this kind of tonality (with references to the music of Wagner, Mahler, and himself, amongst others) as "aufgehobene Tonalität" and "schwebende Tonalität", usually rendered in English as "suspended" ("not in effect", "cancelled") tonality and "fluctuating" ("suspended", "not yet decided") tonality, respectively.


20th century

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," 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." 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". For the composer and theorist
George Perle George Perle (6 May 1915 – 23 January 2009) was an American composer and music theorist. As a composer, his music was largely atonal, using methods similar to the twelve-tone technique of the Second Viennese School. This serialist style, and ...
, 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".


Theoretical underpinnings

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. 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'', holds that diatonic scales and tonality arise from natural overtones. Rudolph Réti differentiates between harmonic tonality of the traditional kind found in
homophony In music, homophony (;, Greek: ὁμόφωνος, ''homóphōnos'', from ὁμός, ''homós'', "same" and φωνή, ''phōnē'', "sound, tone") is a texture in which a primary part is supported by one or more additional strands that flesh ...
, and melodic tonality, as in
monophony In music, monophony is the simplest of musical textures, consisting of a melody (or "tune"), typically sung by a single singer or played by a single instrument player (e.g., a flute player) without accompanying harmony or chords. Many folk so ...
. In the harmonic kind, tonality is produced through the VI
chord progression In a musical composition, a chord progression or harmonic progression (informally chord changes, used as a plural) is a succession of chords. Chord progressions are the foundation of harmony in Western musical tradition from the common practice ...
. 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) 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
he tonic He or HE may refer to: Language * He (pronoun), an English pronoun * He (kana), the romanization of the Japanese kana へ * He (letter), the fifth letter of many Semitic alphabets * He (Cyrillic), a letter of the Cyrillic script called ''He'' in ...
" this note not always being the tonic as interpreted according to harmonic tonality. His examples are ancient Jewish and
Gregorian chant Gregorian chant is the central tradition of Western plainchant, a form of monophonic, unaccompanied sacred song in Latin (and occasionally Greek) of the Roman Catholic Church. Gregorian chant developed mainly in western and central Europe dur ...
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 ''The Magic Flute'' (German: , ), K. 620, is an opera in two acts by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to a German libretto by Emanuel Schikaneder. The work is in the form of a '' Singspiel'', a popular form during the time it was written that in ...
'' below, are actually "strict harmonic-rhythmic pattern " 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. 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 (Achille) Claude Debussy (; 22 August 1862 – 25 March 1918) was a French composer. He is sometimes seen as the first Impressionism in music, Impressionist composer, although he vigorously rejected the term. He was among the most infl ...
: "melodic tonality plus
modulation In electronics and telecommunications, modulation is the process of varying one or more properties of a periodic waveform, called the '' carrier signal'', with a separate signal called the ''modulation signal'' that typically contains informat ...
is ebussy'smodern tonality".


Outside common-practice period

The noun "tonality" and adjective "tonal" are widely applied also, in studies of early and modern Western music, and in non-Western traditional music (
Arabic maqam Arabic maqam ( ar, مقام, maqām, literally "rank"; ') is the system of melodic modes used in traditional Arabic music, which is mainly melodic. The word ''maqam'' in Arabic means place, location or position. The Arabic ''maqam'' is a mel ...
, Indian
raga A ''raga'' or ''raag'' (; also ''raaga'' or ''ragam''; ) is a melodic framework for improvisation in Indian classical music akin to a melodic mode. The ''rāga'' is a unique and central feature of the classical Indian music tradition, and as ...
, Indonesian
slendro Slendro ( jv, ꦱ꧀ꦭꦺꦤ꧀ꦢꦿꦺꦴ, ban, slendro, translit=Sléndro) ( su, salendro, translit=Saléndro) is one of the essential tuning systems used in gamelan instruments that have pentatonic scale. Based on Javanese mythology, ...
etc.), to the "systematic arrangements of pitch phenomena and relations between them". Felix Wörner, Ullrich Scheideler, and Philip Rupprecht in the introduction to a collection of essays dedicated to the concept and practice of tonality between 1900 and 1950 describe it generally as "the awareness of key in music". Harold Powers, in a series of articles, used terms "sixteenth-century tonalities" and "Renaissance tonality". He borrowed German "Tonartentyp" from , who related it to Palestrina, translated it into English as "tonal type", and systematically applied the concept of "tonal types" to Renaissance sacred and paraliturgical 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 des Prez Josquin Lebloitte dit des Prez ( – 27 August 1521) was a composer of High Renaissance music, who is variously described as French or Franco-Flemish. Considered one of the greatest composers of the Renaissance, he was a central figure of the ...
. Judd also wrote of "chant-based tonality", meaning "tonal" polyphonic compositions based on plainchant. Peter Lefferts found "tonal types" in the French polyphonic chanson of the 14th century, Italian musicologists Marco Mangani and Daniele Sabaino in the late Renaissance music, and so on. The wide usage of "tonality" and "tonal" has been supported by several other musicologists (of diverse provenance). 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 ''The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians'' is an encyclopedic dictionary of music and musicians. Along with the German-language ''Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart'', it is one of the largest reference works on the history and theo ...
'' article "Mode", etc.). Therefore, two different German words "Tonart" and "Tonalität" have sometimes been translated as "tonality" although they are not the same words in German. In 1882, Hugo Riemann defined the term ''Tonalität'' specifically to include chromatic as well as diatonic relationships to a tonic, in contrast to the usual diatonic concept of ''Tonart''. In the
neo-Riemannian theory Neo-Riemannian theory is a loose collection of ideas present in the writings of music theorists such as David Lewin, Brian Hyer, Richard Cohn, and Henry Klumpenhouwer. What binds these ideas is a central commitment to relating harmonies directly to ...
of the late 20th century, however, the same chromatic chord relations cited by Riemann came to be regarded as a fundamental example of nontonal triadic relations, reinterpreted as a product of the hexatonic cycle (the six-pitch-class set forming a scale of alternating minor thirds and semitones, Forte's set-type 6–20, but manifested as a succession of from four to six alternating major and minor triads), defined without reference to a tonic. In the 20th century, music that no longer conformed to the strict definition of common-practice tonality could nevertheless still involve musical phenomena (harmonies, cadential formulae, harmonic progressions, melodic gestures, formal categories) arranged or understood in relation to a referential tonic. For example, the closing bars of the first movement of
Béla Bartók Béla Viktor János Bartók (; ; 25 March 1881 – 26 September 1945) was a Hungarian composer, pianist, and ethnomusicologist. He is considered one of the most important composers of the 20th century; he and Franz Liszt are regarded as Hu ...
's '' Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta'' do not involve a composed-out triad, but rather a diverging-converging pair of chromatic lines moving from a unison A to an octave E and back to a unison A again, providing a framing "deep structure" based on a tritone relationship that nevertheless is not analogous to a tonic-dominant axis, but rather remains within the single functional domain of the tonic, A. To distinguish this species of tonality (found also, for example, in the music of
Barber A barber is a person whose occupation is mainly to cut, dress, groom, style and shave men's and boys' hair or beards. A barber's place of work is known as a "barbershop" or a "barber's". Barbershops are also places of social interaction and publi ...
,
Berg Berg may refer to: People *Berg (surname), a surname (including a list of people with the name) *Berg Ng (born 1960), Hong Kong actor * Berg (footballer) (born 1989), Brazilian footballer Former states * Berg (state), county and duchy of the Hol ...
, Bernstein,
Britten Edward Benjamin Britten, Baron Britten (22 November 1913 – 4 December 1976, aged 63) was an English composer, conductor, and pianist. He was a central figure of 20th-century British music, with a range of works including opera, other ...
, Fine, Hindemith,
Poulenc Francis Jean Marcel Poulenc (; 7 January 189930 January 1963) was a French composer and pianist. His compositions include songs, solo piano works, chamber music, choral pieces, operas, ballets, and orchestral concert music. Among the best-kno ...
,
Prokofiev Sergei Sergeyevich Prokofiev; alternative transliterations of his name include ''Sergey'' or ''Serge'', and ''Prokofief'', ''Prokofieff'', or ''Prokofyev''., group=n (27 April .S. 15 April1891 – 5 March 1953) was a Russian composer, p ...
, and, especially, Stravinsky) from the stricter kind associated with the 18th century, some writers use the term "
neotonality Neotonality (or Neocentricity) is an inclusive term referring to musical compositions of the twentieth century in which the tonality of the common-practice period (i.e. functional harmony and tonic-dominant relationships) is replaced by one or seve ...
", while others prefer to use the term ''centricity'', and still others retain the term, ''tonality'', in its broader sense, or use word combinations like ''extended tonality''.; .


Computational methods to determine the key

In
music information retrieval Music information retrieval (MIR) is the interdisciplinary science of retrieving information from music. MIR is a small but growing field of research with many real-world applications. Those involved in MIR may have a background in academic musicol ...
, 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 In music, a pitch class (p.c. or pc) is a set of all pitches that are a whole number of octaves apart; for example, the pitch class C consists of the Cs in all octaves. "The pitch class C stands for all possible Cs, in whatever octave posit ...
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. For implementation, often the
constant-Q transform In mathematics and signal processing, the constant-Q transform and variable-Q transform, simply known as CQT and VQT, transforms a data series to the frequency domain. It is related to the Fourier transform Judith C. BrownCalculation of a constant ...
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.


See also

* History of music *
Harry Partch Harry Partch (June 24, 1901 – September 3, 1974) was an American composer, music theorist, and creator of unique musical instruments. He composed using scales of unequal intervals in just intonation, and was one of the first 20th-century com ...
'
Otonality and Utonality ''Otonality'' and ''utonality'' are terms introduced by Harry Partch to describe chord (music), chords whose pitch classes are the harmonics or subharmonics of a given fixed root (chord), tone (identity (tuning), identity), respectively. For ...
* Peter Westergaard's tonal theory *
Polytonality Polytonality (also polyharmony) is the musical use of more than one key simultaneously. Bitonality is the use of only two different keys at the same time. Polyvalence or polyvalency is the use of more than one harmonic function, from the same key ...
*
Tonality diamond In music theory and tuning, a tonality diamond is a two-dimensional diagram of ratios in which one dimension is the Otonality and one the Utonality.Rasch, Rudolph (2000). "A Word or Two on the Tunings of Harry Partch", ''Harry Partch: An Anthol ...
*
Schenkerian analysis Schenkerian analysis is a method of analyzing tonal music based on the theories of Heinrich Schenker (1868–1935). The goal is to demonstrate the organic coherence of the work by showing how it relates to an abstracted deep structure, the ''Urs ...


Footnotes


Sources

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * English translation by Mark McCune as "Hugo Riemann's 'Ueber Tonalität': A Translation". ''Theoria'' 1 (1985): 132–150. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *


Further reading

* * Benjamin, Thomas. 2003. ''The Craft of Tonal Counterpoint, with Examples from the Music of Johann Sebastian Bach'', second edition. New York: Routledge. . * Blum, Stephen. 2006. "Navā'i: A Musical Genre of Northeastern Iran". In ''Analytical Studies in World Music'', edited by
Michael Tenzer Michael Tenzer (born 1957) is a composer, performer, and music educator and scholar. Tenzer was born in New York City and studied music at Yale University (BA. 1978) and University of California, Berkeley (Ph.D. 1986). After teaching at Yale fro ...
, 41–57. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. (cloth); (pbk) *
Castil-Blaze François-Henri-Joseph Blaze, known as Castil-Blaze (1 December 1784 – 11 December 1857), was a French musicologist, music critic, composer, and music editor. Biography Blaze was born and grew up in Cavaillon, Vaucluse. He went to Paris ...
. 1821. '. Paris: Au magazin de musique de la Lyre moderne. * Cohn, Richard. 2012. ''Audacious Euphony: Chromatic Harmony and the Triad's Second Nature''. Oxford Studies in Music Theory. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. . * DeVoto, Mark. 2004. ''Debussy and the Veil of Tonality: Essays on His Music''. Dimension and Diversity: Studies in 20th-century Music 4. N.p.: Pendragon Press. . *
Einstein, Alfred Alfred Einstein (December 30, 1880February 13, 1952) was a German-American musicologist and music editor. He was born in Munich and fled Nazi Germany after Hitler's '' Machtergreifung'', arriving in the United States by 1939. He is best known ...
. 1954. ''A Short History of Music'', fourth American edition, revised. New York: Vintage Books. * Gustin, Molly. 1969. ''Tonality''. New York: Philosophical Library. . * Harrison, Lou. 1992. "Entune." ''Contemporary Music Review'' 6, no. 2:9–10. * Janata, Petr, Jeffery L. Birk, John D. Van Horn, Marc Leman, Barbara Tillmann, and Jamshed J. Bharucha. 2002. "The Cortical Topography of Tonal Structures Underlying Western Music." ''Science'' 298, no. 5601 (December 13): 2167–2170. * Kepler, Johannes. 1619. ''Harmonices mundi'' atin: The Harmony of the World Linz: Godofredo Tampechi. * Kilmer, Anne Draffkorn, Richard L. Crocker, and Robert R. Brown. 1976. ''Sounds from Silence, Recent Discoveries in Ancient Near Eastern Music''. LP sound recording, 33⅓ rpm, 12 inch, with bibliography (23 p. ill.) laid in container. .p. Bit Enki Records. LCC#75-750773 /R. * Manuel, Peter. 2006. "Flamenco in Focus: An Analysis of a Performance of Soleares". In ''Analytical Studies in World Music'', edited by Michael Tenzer, 92–119. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. (cloth); (pbk) * Marpurg, Friedrich Wilhelm. 1753–54. ''Abhandlung von der Fuge nach dem Grundsätzen der besten deutschen und ausländischen Meister''. 2 vols. Berlin: A. Haude, und J. C. Spener. * * Perle, George. 1978. ''Twelve-Tone Tonality''. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. (first edition reprinted 1996, ; second edition 1995, ). * Pleasants, Henry. 1955 ''The Agony of Modern Music''. New York: Simon & Schuster. LCC#54-12361. * Rameau, Jean-Philippe. 1722.
Traité de l'harmonie réduite à ses principes naturels
'. Paris: Ballard. * Rameau, Jean-Philippe. 1726. ''Nouveau Systême de Musique Theorique, où l'on découvre le Principe de toutes les Regles necessaires à la Pratique, Pour servir d'Introduction au Traité de l'Harmonie''. Paris: L'Imprimerie de Jean-Baptiste-Christophe Ballard. * Rameau, Jean-Philippe. 1737. ''Génération harmonique, ou Traité de musique théorique et pratique''. Paris: Prault fils. * Rameau, Jean-Philippe. 1750. ''Démonstration du Principe de L'Harmonie, Servant de base à tout l'Art Musical théorique et pratique''. Paris: Durand et Pissot. * Reichert, Georg. 1962. "Tonart und Tonalität in der älteren Musik". ''Musikalische Zeitfragen'', edited by Walter Wiora, 10. Kassel: Bärenreiter Verlag, pp. 97–104. * Miguel Roig-Francolí, Roig-Francolí, Miguel A. 2008. ''Understanding Post-Tonal Music''. New York: McGraw-Hill. . * Samson, Jim. 1977. ''Music in Transition: A Study of Tonal Expansion and Atonality, 1900–1920''. New York: W. W. Norton. . Samson suggests the following discussions of tonality as defined by Fétis, Helmholtz, Riemann, D'Indy, Adler, Yasser, and others: ** Beswick, Delbert M. 1950. "The Problem of Tonality in Seventeenth Century Music". Ph.D. thesis. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina. p. 1–29. . ** Shirlaw, Matthew. 1917. ''The Theory of Harmony: An Inquiry into the Natural Principles of Harmony; with an Examination of the Chief Systems of Harmony from Rameau to the Present Day''. London: Novello. (Reprinted New York: Da Capo Press, 1969. .) * Rings, Steven. 2011. ''Tonality and Transformation''. Oxford Studies in Music Theory. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. . * Schellenberg, E. Glenn, and Sandra E. Trehub. 1996. "Natural Musical Intervals: Evidence from Infant Listeners" '' Psychological Science'', vol. 7, no. 5 (September): 272–277. * Schenker, Heinrich. 1954. ''Harmony'', edited and annotated by
Oswald Jonas Oswald Jonas (January 10, 1897 – March 19, 1978) was a music theorist and musicologist and student of Heinrich Schenker. Despite Schenker's conservative nationalist views Jonas was an admirer of Karl Kraus. In 1935, Jonas founded the Schenker ...
; translated by Elisabeth Mann-Borgese. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. . Translation of ''Neue musikalische Theorien und Phantasien'' 1: ''Harmonielehre''. (Reprinted Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1973, .) * Schenker, Heinrich. 1979. ''Free Composition'', translated and edited by Ernst Oster. New York: Longman. Translation of ''Neue musikalische Theorien und Phantasien'' 3: ''Der freie Satz''. . * Schenker, Heinrich. 1987. ''Counterpoint'', translated by John Rothgeb and Jürgen Thym; edited by John Rothgeb. 2 vols. New York: Schirmer Books; London: Collier Macmillan. Translation of ''Neue musikalische Theorien und Phantasien'' 2: ''Kontrapunkt''. . * Stegemann, Benedikt. 2013. ''Theory of Tonality'', translated by David LeClair. Theoretical Studies. Wilhelmshaven: Noetzel. . * Thomson, William. 1999. ''Tonality in Music: A General Theory''. San Marino, California: Everett Books. . * Tymoczko, Dmitri. 2011. ''A Geometry of Music: Harmony and Counterpoint in the Extended Common Practice''. Oxford Studies in Music Theory. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. . * West, Martin Litchfield. 1994. "The Babylonian Musical Notation and the Hurrian Melodic Texts". '' Music & Letters'' 75, no. 2 (May): 161–179.


External links

*
Music Fundamentals: Tonal Music
, ''BigComposer.com'' *

, ''RobertKelleyPhd.com'' *

, ''SolomonsMusic.net'' *
Reference Guide to Tonal Music
, ''TonalityGUIDE.com'' *
Tonalcentre.org
': "explains and demonstrates some of the key concepts of tonality" *

, ''Sonantometry.blogspot.com'' *

, ''BW.Musique.UMontreal.ca'' {{Authority control Harmony Music theory