# Tristan und Isolde´s follower?



## NothungWorld

I am a classical pianist and has just played through Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde.
The beginning, the prelude is especially interesting from a theoretical standpoint.

My question is: What other musical works can be said is a direct sequel, heir, follower to
Tristan und Isolde's musical language from a purely music theoretical point of view.
A piece of music where Wagners idiom is even more atonalt, but with Tristan's spirit, which is important?
I would like to get examples of specific works?


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## Pugg

For one minute I thought I was dreaming, but I did see this topic twice.


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## millionrainbows

NothungWorld said:


> I am a classical pianist and has just played through Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde.
> The beginning, the prelude is especially interesting from a theoretical standpoint.
> 
> My question is: What other musical works can be said is a direct sequel, heir, follower to
> Tristan und Isolde's musical language from a purely music theoretical point of view.
> A piece of music where Wagners idiom is even more atonalt, but with Tristan's spirit, which is important?
> I would like to get examples of specific works?


I would suggest Berg's Piano Sonata, op. 1. Maybe some R. Strauss, like Metamorphosen. Be sure to check out Glenn Gould's conducting of it in orchestral form.


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## EdwardBast

NothungWorld said:


> I am a classical pianist and has just played through Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde.
> The beginning, the prelude is especially interesting from a theoretical standpoint.
> 
> My question is: What other musical works can be said is a direct sequel, heir, follower to
> Tristan und Isolde's musical language from a purely music theoretical point of view.
> A piece of music where Wagners idiom is even more atonalt, but with Tristan's spirit, which is important?
> I would like to get examples of specific works?


What do you think is atonal about the language of T&I (if you are still out there)?


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## DavidA

NothungWorld said:


> I am a classical pianist *and has just played through Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde.*
> The beginning, the prelude is especially interesting from a theoretical standpoint.
> 
> My question is: What other musical works can be said is a direct sequel, heir, follower to
> Tristan und Isolde's musical language from a purely music theoretical point of view.
> A piece of music where Wagners idiom is even more atonalt, but with Tristan's spirit, which is important?
> I would like to get examples of specific works?


You must be good, mate! :tiphat:


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## millionrainbows

EdwardBast said:


> What do you think is atonal about the language of T&I (if you are still out there)?


Edward! You must have forgotten the definition of terms established by Mahlerian! He means "atonal" strictly in the sense of "not Common Practice Tonal," which includes most tonally-centered music of the world, including ethnic, world, folk, and pop.


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## amfortas

Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht?


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## hpowders

Berg Wozzeck.


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## Norma Skock

Mahler is the only real successor to Wagner without verging into complete atonality.


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## Pugg

Norma Skock said:


> Mahler is the only real successor to Wagner without verging into complete atonality.


I do agree, 100% .


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## millionrainbows

Norma Skock said:


> Mahler is the only real successor to Wagner without verging into complete atonality.


What about Richard Strauss? I see him as part of the succession beyond Wagner. Admittedly, Strauss ventured right up to the edge of tonality in Elektra; but by the same token, Mahler got weird on occasion, like that dissonant chord in the Tenth, and other places before that.


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## Vox Gabrieli

I'd say the Tenth is reason enough to say Mahler is not clear successor. 

Shostakovitch has a very clear inspiration to Mahler, and all of his symphonies merely toyed hitherto known as dissonance, but I would never say atonal. Had Mahler been a successor to Wagner, and Shostakovitch be a successor to Mahler, does that make Shostakovitch a successor to Wagner? :lol:


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## Norma Skock

The 10th Symphony is FAR from atonal. Just listen to it.


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## millionrainbows

Norma Skock said:


> The 10th Symphony is FAR from atonal. Just listen to it.


There is a chord in the 10th, which I call the "heart attack chord," which is jarringly dissonant. So it needs to be acknowledged that Wagner, Mahler, and Strauss all contributed to the _weakening_ of tonality.

Thus, the answer to the OP's query, "...What other musical works can be said is a direct sequel, heir, follower to Tristan und Isolde's musical language from a purely music theoretical point of view; A piece of music where Wagner's idiom is even _more atonal,_ but with Tristan's spirit, which is important?"

I think the heart of the post is clear, even though the use of the phrase 'more atonal' might have thrown Norma off. I think he means 'further from tonality.' I do not take this too literally, but wish to address the general meaning.


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## Woodduck

Mahler's harmony is not very Wagnerian. Typical passages in late Wagner show constant modulation and "iridescence," with prominence given to chords (diminished and half-diminished sevenths, augmented fifths and sixths) whose inherent ambivalence allow him to pivot into new tonal areas, or avoid clear tonal orientation altogether. Try the prelude to act three of _Parsifal_ as an extraordinary, and easy to hear, example. Harmonically, Berg is a truer successor to Wagner than Mahler (or Strauss).


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## millionrainbows

Wagner, Mahler, Strauss, Berg: all of 'em are guilty of weakening tonality. Strauss especially in Elektra. They're all guilty in various ways. And there's plenty of aspects of Mahler that _are_ Wagnerian, and I include harmony in that. So there! Phoot!


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## Woodduck

millionrainbows said:


> Wagner, Mahler, Strauss, Berg: all of 'em are guilty of weakening tonality. Strauss especially in Elektra. They're all guilty in various ways. And there's plenty of aspects of Mahler that _are_ Wagnerian, and I include harmony in that. So there! Phoot!


Phoot indeed. Its so gratifying and validating when someone answers your post by ignoring/dismissing the point you've made.

Yes, there's plenty in Mahler that he owes to Wagner. It was hard not to owe something to Wagner in that time and place.


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## millionrainbows

Woodduck said:


> Phoot indeed. Its so gratifying and validating when someone answers your post by ignoring/dismissing the point you've made.


Oh, I thought _you_ were invalidating _my_ point, when I said that it needs to be acknowledged that Wagner, Mahler, and Strauss all contributed to the _weakening of tonality.

_My initial answer to the OP was Berg's Piano Sonata, op. 1. Maybe some R. Strauss, like Metamorphosen.

Then, we get confusing statements like this:



Norma Skock said:


> Mahler is the only real successor to Wagner without verging into complete atonality.


And after, you said:



Woodduck said:


> Mahler's harmony is not very Wagnerian. Harmonically, Berg is a truer successor to Wagner than Mahler (or Strauss).


I can agree with that, generally, and it concurs with my initial answer to the OP: Berg's Op. 1.

So, you seem to say that Mahler is "more tonal" and less radical, harmonically, than Wagner, and Wagner was "weakening tonality" to a _greater degree _than Mahler who followed him.

Then I must conclude that you see Mahler as a reactionary, and less adventurous than Wagner, as working 'backwards' harmonically, towards stronger tonality. I can see that.

Where does that leave Norma Skock, who asserts that "Mahler is the only real successor to Wagner without verging into complete atonality?" Is she hearing Mahler as much more radical than he really was? Perhaps this is a good point; how do you explain the dissonant chord in Mahler's tenth? As a momentary lapse?

Which leads me to question the entire OP premise: what qualities would a "successor to Wagner" embody? Would they be more tonal, less tonal, more bombastic, less bombastic? What quality or qualities are we looking to for the "continuity" or "progress" of a successor, either conceptually or chronologically?

Be careful that you are not bolstering the oft-criticized modernist case that harmony from Wagner "progressed" further into the area of atonality. That doesn't seem to go over too well in these parts.


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## Woodduck

The OP asks: _"What other musical works can be said is a direct sequel, heir, follower to Tristan und Isolde's musical language from a purely music theoretical point of view. A piece of music where Wagners idiom is even more atonal, but with Tristan's spirit, which is important?"
_
Since a question like this can never be entirely specific without becoming hopelessly unwieldy (and might not even have an answer if it were too specific), we have to choose some quality or qualities of Wagner's harmony in _Tristan_ which seem most essential, technically and expressively. I chose what I call its "iridescence," the ambivalence of key harmonic events, the ability and propensity to transition from one _chroma_ (color) to another and suggest other _chromas_ along the way, in an ever-changing yet confidently directed and ultimately coherent progression toward destinations which may themselves be unresolved and transitory (but, in the opera, do finally resolve).

This was Wagner's peculiar gift to harmony and his basic method from _Tristan und Isolde_ forward to _Parsifal_, regardless of the varying amounts of diatonicism he utilized for dramatic purposes. I see _Tristan_ as turning the relationship of diatonicism to chromaticism on its head, making the latter fundamental and the former a specific expressive device. This doesn't imply an abrogation of tonality, though. That's a bridge Wagner showed no sign of crossing, even in his most radical moments. _Parsifal_ finally affirms the eternal glory of the triad. But I digress...

I wasn't invalidating your point about the weakening of tonality in the works of the composers you mentioned. I simply wasn't addressing it, being more concerned with _Tristan_ specifically. We seem to agree that Berg stands in closest relation to Wagner here, taking harmonic ambivalence even a bit farther, though not deploying it in such immense tonal structures - at which, I think, no one ever equaled Wagner's skill; Mahler, Strauss and Schoenberg have their Wagnerian moments, but really Wagner's distinction is the scale on which he could deploy his harmony, at once deeply unstable and deeply tonal. When I hear Berg, I often feel Wagner's presence keenly; when I hear those other composers, I feel their relationship to him as more superficial.


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## NothungWorld

EdwardBast said:


> What do you think is atonal about the language of T&I (if you are still out there)?


It is not atonal, but it is beginning to become....


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## NothungWorld

Thanks Woodduck, I am playing through Wagners Parsifal third movement. Interesting.


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## Woodduck

NothungWorld said:


> Thanks Woodduck, I am playing through Wagners Parsifal third movement. Interesting.


You're welcome. I have spent a lot of time over the years playing through the piano scores of _Tristan_ and _Parsifal_ (which Puccini, Schoenberg, and many other composers did too). There are things there that still blow me away, every single time. _Parsifal_ is even subtler than _Tristan,_ full of moments that have me thinking "How did he do that? He was there, and now he's here!"


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## EdwardBast

millionrainbows said:


> Oh, I thought _you_ were invalidating _my_ point, when I said that it needs to be acknowledged that Wagner, Mahler, and Strauss all contributed to the _weakening of tonality.
> _


_

Weakening? Like "breaking down," "exhausting," and so on, this metaphorical comparison to physical processes and materials-and make no mistake, that is the only basis for the eternally tiresome flogging of this trope-doesn't really stand up to even cursory scrutiny. If one subtly bends a spoon enough times, as Yuri Geller demonstrated, it will eventually succumb to metal fatigue. If one puts enough weight on a rope, it will eventually fray and break. Kitchen utensils and braded lines are things, subject to physical forces and stresses. Tonality is not. Composers who have talked about the weakening, breakdown and ultimate demise of tonality used these inept and inapt metaphors as a way of obscuring uncomfortable truths. When someone declares that the novel is dead, or that the existence of complex natural structures like the eye proves the existence of a creator, or that the materials of tonality are exhausted, all they accomplish is to demonstrate their own lack of imagination, arrogance, and keenness to be proved wrong. Starting from the only facts they can be sure of: that they themselves can't think of a fresh approach to narrative literature, a physical-materialist explanation for the development of vision, or a new way to extend or exploit tonal materials and relations, they extrapolate their intellectual impotence to the rest of humanity, all because they don't want to accept that others might possess more skill and imagination than they do. That is arrogance, the kind that assures one will end up on the wrong side of history._


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## Gaspard de la Nuit

I don't think wagner has an heir, he was the 'sunset mistaken for a dawn', as Debussy put it.


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## Woodduck

Gaspard de la Nuit said:


> I don't think wagner has an heir, he was the 'sunset mistaken for a dawn', as Debussy put it.


Meanwhile he complained that he had to fight against having his own first opera sound like Wagner's last. Apparently it's not hard to confuse endings and beginnings - or to mistake metaphors for realities.


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## millionrainbows

EdwardBast said:


> Weakening? Like "breaking down," "exhausting," and so on, this metaphorical comparison to physical processes and materials-and make no mistake, that is the only basis for the eternally tiresome flogging of this trope-doesn't really stand up to even cursory scrutiny. If one subtly bends a spoon enough times, as Yuri Geller demonstrated, it will eventually succumb to metal fatigue. If one puts enough weight on a rope, it will eventually fray and break. Kitchen utensils and braded lines are things, subject to physical forces and stresses. Tonality is not. Composers who have talked about the weakening, breakdown and ultimate demise of tonality used these inept and inapt metaphors as a way of obscuring uncomfortable truths. When someone declares that the novel is dead, or that the existence of complex natural structures like the eye proves the existence of a creator, or that the materials of tonality are exhausted, all they accomplish is to demonstrate their own lack of imagination, arrogance, and keenness to be proved wrong. Starting from the only facts they can be sure of: that they themselves can't think of a fresh approach to narrative literature, a physical-materialist explanation for the development of vision, or a new way to extend or exploit tonal materials and relations, they extrapolate their intellectual impotence to the rest of humanity, all because they don't want to accept that others might possess more skill and imagination than they do. That is arrogance, the kind that assures one will end up on the wrong side of history.


I disagree; there are many reasons why tonality "sounds" and _is_ tonal. 
The hierarchy of relations to a keynote, the use of 7-note scales which limit the chromaticism, 
division of the octave based on a 12-note model derived from the Pythagoran process of stacking or projecting the fifth, 
and correcting it based on octave equivalence and 12 equal fifths (key areas), 
chord functions based on the relation of triad roots to tonic, 
chord progressions designed to create tension and release, etc.

If any of these elements are tampered with, tonality begins to weaken. Ways that have been used are: scales with 8 to 12 notes, divisions of the octave based on symmetry and geometry, chords used with no function, and chord successions with no tonal goal.


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## Neward Thelman

Nuthing World: An interesting question, and one which all but "Wood Duck" have failed to answer; I'd have thought that by now, you'd have had pages of replies, which is usually the case when someone asks for recommendations.

Woodduck, BTW, has proven himself to be THE authority around here; almost everything he's posted has been correct, informative, and insightful. In the short time that I've been here [less than a month], I've actually learned from him [typically, most posts on most classical message boards either **** me off or bore me].

Read Wood's post above carefully. There's musical information in depth. I've actually copied it and pasted it into my own notes.

So, getting to your question - the answer's that lots and lots of composers were considered to have been either influenced by Wagner or to have been outright Wagnerians. That includes Bruckner and Humperdinck, Rott, Strauss, Wolf, Zemlinsky, Mahler, Krenek, Schreker, Korngold, and so many.

However, as Wood carefully delineates, direct, verge-of-atonality turn up with Alban Berg, Anton Webern, and of course, Arnold Schoenberg. But also, Max Reger's harmony, in some of his pieces, is so convoluted and twisted, that it's actually "harder" on the ear than flat, plane old atonality.

Anton Bruckner idolized Wagner most of his adult compositional life. His last 3 symphonies tend to modulate and flow into distant tonal areas, without having established the home key; altho the music still sounds and "feels" more grounded than not. However, listen to the final completed movement of his 9th symphony - and you'll find yourself immediately thrust into the sound world of the whole fin-de-siecle Viennese style of the above mentioned composers. The center of it - a massive dissonance marked forte for full orchestra - is still shocking. Be sure to get a good performance by someone who's not scarred to death of that massive chord [it's still terrifying people more than 120 years after it was written], such as Haitink [who renders it so timidly it sounds like little more than a diminished fifth]. I suggest Solti and the CSO for the fullest realization of the full power of the music.

By the turn of the 20th century, composers were going further and further. Schoenberg's Transfigured Night - which you may hear either in it's string sextet version, or for full string orchestra - has been praised and mocked for taking Tristan as a starting point, and proceeding forward from there. It never settles on a home key until the end.

As others have mentioned, the Second Viennese School - Berg, Weber, Schoenberg - are the most direct and obvious inheritors of Wagner's harmony - but his influence, and the trend toward chromaticism is the defining style of the turn of the century. Indeed, the chromaticism of all of those composers has been the object of negative criticism by radicalist-minded 20th century academics and critics - who viewed anything other than full-on serialism as a failure.

But, listen to Zemlinsky's astonishing Lyric Symphony and you'll find a ravishing application of chromatic harmonic procedures - as well as - and this is something no one else has noticed except me - the most artistically creative application of atonality in any piece up to that time. You'll hear the music slip into atonality - only to rise out of it. What Zemlinsky realized and what he demonstrated was that atonality was a valuable resource - another tool in the box, another color on the palete - rather than being an end in and of itself. That's something the Second Viennese School never realized - or admitted.

Beyond that, the whole world of atonality in the 20th century's wide open to you.


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## Woodduck

Thank you for the kind words, Neward.


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## millionrainbows

Woodduck said:


> Mahler's dissonant chord has no relationship to the harmony of _Tristan und Isolde._ In fact, such harsh and unprepared dissonances are entirely un-Wagnerian.


I must agree with that. You never would have found such a dissonance in Wagner.

Yet, this is simply a surface characteristic: the underlying truth is that both Wagner and Mahler were chiseling away at weakening tonality, while at the same time sharing much of the same large form and other characteristics (use of sopranos, large forms and orchestral forces, dramatic gesture, etc.)

The same kind of declamatory chord is found in Schoenberg's Pelleas und Mellisande, and Arnie professed to being a Wagnerian.

Why are you trying to push Mahler away from Wagner, and remove him from our consideration as one of the heirs to Wagner? Does this juxtaposition make you uneasy for some unnamed reason? What is it about you and Wagner?


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## mmsbls

Please refrain from commenting on other members in any manner that is not clearly positive. We have unapproved some posts until we can decide how to act - delete the whole post, delete some of the post, approve all the post.


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## Woodduck

millionrainbows said:


> I must agree with that. You never would have found such a dissonance in Wagner.
> 
> Yet, this is simply a surface characteristic: the underlying truth is that both Wagner and Mahler were chiseling away at weakening tonality, while at the same time sharing much of the same large form and other characteristics (use of sopranos, large forms and orchestral forces, dramatic gesture, etc.)
> 
> The same kind of declamatory chord is found in Schoenberg's Pelleas und Mellisande, and Arnie professed to being a Wagnerian.
> 
> Why are you trying to push Mahler away from Wagner, and remove him from our consideration as one of the heirs to Wagner? Does this juxtaposition make you uneasy for some unnamed reason? What is it about you and Wagner?


The OP did not ask a general question about the "weakening of tonality" and the broad influence of Wagner. It asked about _Tristan_ _in particular,_ in both it's theoretical aspects and its _"spirit, which is important."_ You didn't address that. I did. Let it end there.


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## Neward Thelman

NothungWorld said:


> Thanks Woodduck, I am playing through Wagners Parsifal third movement. Interesting.


You mean Act 3.

It's an opera - oops - a "music drama". Moozeek dhrama.

No movements - it's not a symphony - altho you wouldn't be the first to consider Wagner's operas to be symphonic. I believe Eric Salzman wrote that Wagner's operas were indeed more symphonic than most of the symphonies composed at the time.


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## Neward Thelman

millionrainbows said:


> I disagree; there are many reasons why tonality "sounds" and _is_ tonal.
> The hierarchy of relations to a keynote, the use of 7-note scales which limit the chromaticism,
> division of the octave based on a 12-note model derived from the Pythagoran process of stacking or projecting the fifth,
> and correcting it based on octave equivalence and 12 equal fifths (key areas),
> chord functions based on the relation of triad roots to tonic,
> chord progressions designed to create tension and release, etc.
> 
> If any of these elements are tampered with, tonality begins to weaken. Ways that have been used are: scales with 8 to 12 notes, divisions of the octave based on symmetry and geometry, chords used with no function, and chord successions with no tonal goal.


Correct...........


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## Neward Thelman

EdwardBast said:


> What do you think is atonal about the language of T&I (if you are still out there)?


It's not. Or, it probably has a atonal passages thruout [who can remember? It Wagner - hours and hours long].

It is, in fact, extremely chromatic. Chromaticism was the predominant style during the last quarter or so of the 19th cent, rising to even greater use and heights right up to the 1920's, and even beyond.

Even Glazunov adopted chromaticism in his last symphonies.

For you and Nuthung, I suggest the symphonies of Franz Schmidt - particularly his austere, sobering, and profound Forth, and well as anything of Zemlinsky's maturity.


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## Neward Thelman

millionrainbows said:


> Wagner, Mahler, Strauss, Berg: all of 'em are guilty of weakening tonality. Strauss especially in Elektra. They're all guilty in various ways. And there's plenty of aspects of Mahler that _are_ Wagnerian, and I include harmony in that. So there! Phoot!


Well, actually ------

You're right - but - it's all even more complicated. Music --- and life --- are like that.

"Weakening" is one way of looking at it - but - IMO - expanding is a more accurate way of looking at it.

And, if we're looking at the progress of music along these lines, then we actually have to go back to ------ Beethoven. Specifically, to his last quartets [and piano sonatas]. Personally, I don't like them - and neither did Tchaikovsky - but who am I?

After that, the gates were breached, and every succeeding composer of worth cracked them open a bit more - especially noting Chopin along the way. Bernstein - I believe one of his Harvard Lectures - explores this very well, and in a way that's easy for the average listener to understand.

But. you're absolutely correct that the generation succeeding Wagner [and Bruckner] made the expansion of tonality their mission in life.

Tooph.


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## Neward Thelman

millionrainbows said:


> Where does that leave Norma Skock, who asserts that "Mahler is the only real successor to Wagner without verging into complete atonality?" Is she hearing Mahler as much more radical than he really was? Perhaps this is a good point; how do you explain the dissonant chord in Mahler's tenth? As a momentary lapse?
> 
> .


Super cool name. Norma Skock. Excellent.

"Mahler is the only real successor to Wagner without verging into complete atonality?"

I understand the idea. It's been around, actually, for a while. However, as with all generalizations, it's not really accurate. There was, actually, a whole school of composers - particularly Viennese ones - who inherited the Wagnerian mantle. Strauss was - initially - the most well known.

As for atonality, Eric Salzman said that Wagner came to the chasm - and backed away. Schoenberg jumped in.

""successor to Wagner" embody? Would they be more tonal, less tonal, more bombastic, less bombastic? What quality or qualities are we looking to for the "continuity" or "progress" of a successor, either conceptually or chronologically?"

Just need to attend Bayreuth.

Wagner doesn't completely dive into atonality - even tho he comes so close. That doesn't mean that others didn't also approach "the chasm". Bruckner was already doing so.


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## Neward Thelman

millionrainbows said:


> Yet, this is simply a surface characteristic: the underlying truth is that both Wagner and Mahler were chiseling away at weakening tonality, while at the same time sharing much of the same large form and other characteristics (use of sopranos, large forms and orchestral forces, dramatic gesture, etc.)
> 
> The same kind of declamatory chord is found in Schoenberg's Pelleas und Mellisande, and Arnie professed to being a Wagnerian.
> 
> Why are you trying to push Mahler away from Wagner, and remove him from our consideration as one of the heirs to Wagner? Does this juxtaposition make you uneasy for some unnamed reason? What is it about you and Wagner?


"chiseling away at weakening tonality" - They weren't exactly doing that. What they were doing was expanding the expressive possibilites of music - chromaticism was the means by which that's accomplished.

"dramatic gesture" - see my reply above. The trend starts with Beethoven and continues non-stop from there. So did chromaticism. "Dramatic gesture" is one of the defining characteristics of the Romantic century. Cf., Classicism.

"Arnie professed to being a Wagnerian" - did he actually 'profess'? What ever the cased, he certainly lived a musically thoroughly Wagnerian life - atonality wouldn't be possible with out Wagner - or a Wagner. And, in music history, he's considered to be a Wagnerian. Transfigured Night, Pelleas, Gurre Leider [a masterpiece] - are all Wagnerian.

"Why are you trying to push Mahler away from Wagner..." - I don't think Wood's doing that. He's very accurately answering the original question, and insightfully delineating the differences in style. But, whether Wood agrees or not, Mahler was a successor to Wagner. He idolized Wagner - and said so. Altho, very interestingly, laterin life he noted that given a choice, he'd choose Beethoven over Wagner.


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## Woodduck

Neward Thelman said:


> "chiseling away at weakening tonality" - They weren't exactly doing that. What they were doing was expanding the expressive possibilites of music - chromaticism was the means by which that's accomplished.
> 
> "dramatic gesture" - see my reply above. The trend starts with Beethoven and continues non-stop from there. So did chromaticism. "Dramatic gesture" is one of the defining characteristics of the Romantic century. Cf., Classicism.
> 
> "Arnie professed to being a Wagnerian" - did he actually 'profess'? What ever the cased, he certainly lived a musically thoroughly Wagnerian life - atonality wouldn't be possible with out Wagner - or a Wagner. And, in music history, he's considered to be a Wagnerian. Transfigured Night, Pelleas, Gurre Leider [a masterpiece] - are all Wagnerian.
> 
> "Why are you trying to push Mahler away from Wagner..." - I don't think Wood's doing that. He's very accurately answering the original question, and insightfully delineating the differences in style. But, *whether Wood agrees or not, Mahler was a successor to Wagner. He idolized Wagner - and said so.* Altho, very interestingly, laterin life he noted that given a choice, he'd choose Beethoven over Wagner.


I do indeed agree, to a degree. In a way, Mahler hybridized the symphony with the music-drama, and did a pretty good )) job with an impossible task. I've always wondered what Wagner himself would have done in those late symphonies he threatened to write. It's little noted that he more than once expressed reservations (to be found in Cosima's diaries) about composers' attempting to use his dramatic musical devices (which ones, he didn't say) in musical works not intended for the stage, saying that "in the symphony one works very differently." One wonders where his solutions to the problems of integrating his developed harmonic idiom into symphonic structures might have taken him, and if anything in Mahler - or late Bruckner, or Schmidt - might be indicative.


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## Bettina

Neward Thelman said:


> "chiseling away at weakening tonality" - They weren't exactly doing that. What they were doing was expanding the expressive possibilites of music - chromaticism was the means by which that's accomplished...


Actually, Wagner _was _doing exactly that. Many of his harmonies, particularly in Tristan and Parsifal, are based on cycles of thirds. Such circle-of-thirds progressions weakened the fundamental principle of common-practice tonality, which is based on root motion by fifths.

From the very beginning of the Tristan prelude, with its sequences based on ascending minor thirds, the interval of the fifth no longer operates as the organizing principle. This becomes even more pronounced in the love duet (Act II, Scene II) with a series of minor-third transpositions, outlining a diminished seventh chord as the background harmony. The defining features of functional tonality - dominant-tonic relationships, and circle-of-fifth progressions/sequences - are not salient traits of Wagner's harmonic language. For that reason, I would consider much of Tristan (and Parsifal, for that matter) to be post-tonal.


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## Woodduck

Bettina said:


> Actually, Wagner _was _doing exactly that. Many of his harmonies, particularly in Tristan and Parsifal, are based on cycles of thirds. Such circle-of-thirds progressions weakened the fundamental principle of common-practice tonality, which is based on root motion by fifths.
> 
> From the very beginning of the Tristan prelude, with its sequences based on ascending minor thirds, the interval of the fifth no longer operates as the organizing principle. This becomes even more pronounced in the love duet (Act II, Scene II) with a series of minor-third transpositions, outlining a diminished seventh chord as the background harmony. The defining features of functional tonality - dominant-tonic relationships, and circle-of-fifth progressions/sequences - are not salient traits of Wagner's harmonic language. For that reason, I would consider much of Tristan (and Parsifal, for that matter) to be post-tonal.


I'm more with Neward on this point. You're using the term "tonality" in its more restricted, strictly Western, academic definition, i.e. "common practice tonality." The broader sense, which I would define as "the systematic organization of the notes of a scale in relation to a central tone," finds Wagner's harmony quite tonal, and merely creating situations of tonal instability, fluctuation, and ambiguity. In fact, the effect of his harmony is still dependent upon its being heard through the implicit "norm" of common practice, and the dominant-tonic relationship still underlies much of it, even if "substitutions" occur and cadences are deceptive. Extended passages of his music, such as the opening passages of the _Tristan_ prelude before it settles upon C-major for the first real tune, as well as the long crescendo to the climax of the Liebestod, may be read as dominants in search of a tonic - for which, figuratively speaking, the whole story of the passion of Tristan and Isolde is a metaphor.

I think Wagner's harmony is sometimes misunderstood, as embodied in the Schoenberg-influenced view that he was following some inevitable path in "breaking down" tonality as a viable principle of harmonic organization. Chromaticism was for Wagner, exactly as for all prior composers, primarily an expressive device, and the extremes to which he carried it were compelled by the extremes of expression his dramatic conceptions required, as well as provided with an ideal arena in opera, a form to which the tonal structures of absolute music have limited (and little necessary) application. In the opera which immediately followed _Tristan_,_ Die Meistersinger,_ he was pleased to revel in radiant diatonicism, albeit subtly enriched with harmonic lessons learned; and in the post-_Tristan_ sections of the _Ring_ and in _Parsifal _he alternately mixed and juxtaposed the diatonic and the chromatic with keen dramatic skill. The concluding scene of _Parsifal_, coming after some of the most agonizing chromatic passages ever composed, gloriously reaffirms the diatonic foundation of Wagner's musical universe.


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## mmsbls

Many posts were deleted and some were edited. I tried to keep as many of the comments on the thread topic as possible.


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## Neward Thelman

millionrainbows said:


> you are still speaking in defense of tonality, and defending the conservative, tonal Wagner, not Wagner as a progressive or as a portent of things to come.
> .


I don't think Wood's saying that at all. That'd be ridiculous - and historically blatantly incorrect. Even at it's most non-musically technical aspect - Wagner's role in history as harmonic innovator [among other things] is completely documented an well known, to wit: the whole Brahms vs. Wagner war - which raged over decades and even split apart families.

Indeed, it's one of the most fascinating aspects of 19th cent history. It created so many byproducts - like thousands of sparks flying off of a mantel as it's being struck with a hammer.

The adult life of Anton Bruckner and its tragedy is just one of those byproducts. And, actually, the meteoric career of Hanslick is another.

Wood's not attempting to characterize Wagner as a conservative, or as a recalcitrant tonalist. I don't understand your objection. Wood says "what I call its "iridescence," the ambivalence of key harmonic events, the ability and propensity to transition from one chroma (color) to another and suggest other chromas along the way, in an ever-changing yet confidently directed and ultimately coherent progression toward destinations which may themselves be unresolved and transitory".

That's the opposite of some traditionalist tonalist with little view of the future.

A good deal that you've typed is accurate --- and not actually in contradiction to Wood - or Bettina - just a slightly different view point of the same thing.

[BTW - Bettina - really pretty name, eh?]


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## Neward Thelman

Bettina said:


> Actually, Wagner _was _doing exactly that. Many of his harmonies, particularly in Tristan and Parsifal, are based on cycles of thirds. Such circle-of-thirds progressions weakened the fundamental principle of common-practice tonality, which is based on root motion by fifths.
> 
> From the very beginning of the Tristan prelude, with its sequences based on ascending minor thirds, the interval of the fifth no longer operates as the organizing principle. This becomes even more pronounced in the love duet (Act II, Scene II) with a series of minor-third transpositions, outlining a diminished seventh chord as the background harmony. The defining features of functional tonality - dominant-tonic relationships, and circle-of-fifth progressions/sequences - are not salient traits of Wagner's harmonic language. For that reason, I would consider much of Tristan (and Parsifal, for that matter) to be post-tonal.


That's fine. I avoid that term weakening, because it creates the impression that 19th cent composers has that as some sort of goal in and of itself, without any purpose. That's why I prefer to say expansion. 'Expanding' tonality is pretty much what they did.

This is illuminating: "with its sequences based on ascending minor thirds, the interval of the fifth no longer operates as the organizing principle...with a series of minor-third transpositions...The defining features of functional tonality - dominant-tonic relationships, and circle-of-fifth progressions/sequences - are not salient traits of Wagner's harmonic language".

I hadn't thought through the implications of that kind of harmonic motion.

I think that your analysis complements Wood's very well, and provides important insights into the music.

In fact - it's pushed me to play Parsifal [my fav Wagner] - I've been listening to it all evening. First time in many years. Thanks.


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## millionrainbows

I see this whole discourse as conservative vs. modernist, which seems to persist, as is seen on the Prepared Piano thread.

Wagner had successors, for sure; I see the composer who most directly and completely connects late Wagner with the 20th century to be Schoenberg. He began with Tristaneque Wagnerism in Transfigured Night (1899), the Gurrelieder (1901), Pelleas und Mellisande (1902), and his first two string quartets.

The conservative faction here seems to want to avoid this conclusion, and to keep Wagner "free of blame" for the modernist expansion of his ideas which came later. They'd apparently rather see Wagner as the apotheosis and end-all-be-all of tonality and its capabilities, and completely ignore the modernist implications.

If you want a good choice for "conservative successor," I would nominate Richard Strauss, who expanded on Wagner's ideas, went up to the precipice of tonality, then backed off. His most radical departures from traditional tonal practices can be seen in Salome and Elektra.

Mahler used Wagnerian influence and applied it to his symphonies. Mahler is pretty securely tonal; he simply exaggerated the Wagneristic delay of resolution and modulation. He should not be discounted as a successor to Wagner, although for some reason this idea does not fly with present company.

The term "successor" is not very specific, and refers to "that which follows" or as an "heir." This can obviously be interpreted conservatively or in a more modernist way.

Schoenberg was a Hegelian as well, and his undeniable discovery of "underlying principles" in music led him to see the trajectory away from tonality as a historical inevitability, a notion which is abhorred by conservative tonalists. Too bad that this historical determinism, also used by Marx, is more scientifically dubious than real science; but after all, this is art, not science.


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## Woodduck

millionrainbows said:


> *I see this whole discourse as conservative vs. modernist,* which seems to persist, as is seen on the Prepared Piano thread.
> 
> Wagner had successors, for sure; I see the composer who most directly and completely connects late Wagner with the 20th century to be Schoenberg. He began with Tristaneque Wagnerism in Transfigured Night (1899), the Gurrelieder (1901), Pelleas und Mellisande (1902), and his first two string quartets.
> 
> *The conservative faction here seems to want to avoid this conclusion, and to keep Wagner "free of blame" for the modernist expansion of his ideas which came later. They'd apparently rather see Wagner as the apotheosis and end-all-be-all of tonality and its capabilities, and completely ignore the modernist implications.
> *
> If you want a good choice for "conservative successor," I would nominate Richard Strauss, who expanded on Wagner's ideas, went up to the precipice of tonality, then backed off. His most radical departures from traditional tonal practices can be seen in Salome and Elektra.
> 
> Mahler used Wagnerian influence and applied it to his symphonies. Mahler is pretty securely tonal; he simply exaggerated the Wagneristic delay of resolution and modulation. *He should not be discounted as a successor to Wagner, although for some reason this idea does not fly with present company.
> *
> *The term "successor"* is not very specific, and refers to "that which follows" or as an "heir." This *can obviously be interpreted conservatively or in a more modernist way.
> *
> *Schoenberg was a Hegelian as well, and his undeniable discovery of "underlying principles" in music led him to see the trajectory away from tonality as a historical inevitability, a notion which is abhorred by conservative tonalists.* Too bad that this historical determinism, also used by Marx, is more scientifically dubious than real science; but after all, this is art, not science.


I don't see a conservative vs. modernist debate at all, and I think it's usually a mistake and an injustice to attach such labels to people. There is no "conservative faction" here trying to keep Wagner "free from blame" - as if "blame' were even a relevant notion - or hold Wagner up as the "end-all-be-all" of tonality and its possibilities, or deny his relevance for future developments in harmony. Nor has anyone denied that Mahler is a successor to Wagner in certain respects, although I don't agree that he "exaggerated the Wagneristic delay of resolution and modulation." Surely pointing out that other composers are closer to Wagner in their harmonic practice doesn't constitute a denial of his influence on Mahler.

As for Schoenberg's acceptance of historical determinism as a justification for what he was doing, it isn't "conservative" to reject that view, and to point out that Wagner himself, also a reader of Hegel, entertained no such notion about his harmonic adventurousness. It's a very interesting fact about him, actually, that of all the elements of his art in which he was conscious of breaking new ground, the one about which he had almost nothing to say was harmony. We might speculate on the oddity of that, give Wagner's compulsion to talk and write about almost everything else.

I don't disagree with many of the specifically musical points you make. I think this and many another conversation would be more productive, and certainly more pleasant, if we did not think in terms of oppositions and antagonisms - "conservative," "modernist," whatever - when our views might better be regarded as complementary.


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## fluteman

Woodduck said:


> I don't see a conservative vs. modernist debate at all, and I think it's usually a mistake and an injustice to attach such labels to people.


Amen to that. And I see nothing objectionable in Woodduck's post no. 15 at the beginning of this thread. I think it was as reasonable, insightful and well written as such a short, general summary of harmony in Wagner can be. Alas, there are some provocateurs in this forum repeatedly pushing theses such as "Schoenberg ruined music for 50 years", or that music that is not based on persistent tonal centers, and/or does not employ diatonic scales built and triads, or uses dissonance (whatever that means) to a greater extent than is acceptable by some sort of traditional standard, is somehow unnatural and wrong. One poster here even said that 20th century modernism was a departure from acceptable tonality that "must never happen again" (or what?, one wonders). 
Ironically, the system of western harmony that Wagner expanded upon and Schoenberg so dramatically (but not really) rejected was a relatively recent innovation in formal western music, having its roots in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, when the diatonic scale was developed, and first the fifth and then the third were accepted as consonant. A method for calculating the equal tempered scale was not widely disseminated until the the mid 17th century, and didn't become the universal standard until well into the 19th. And I agree with Neward that Wagner's innovations in harmonic ambiguity grow out of the developments of late Beethoven and Chopin from earlier in the same (19th) century.
Yet when I listen to, say, traditional Japanese koto music or even Bach's Well Tempered Clavier played in Werckmeister III temperament (which some scholars say was what Bach had in mind when he wrote that music), it sounds slightly out of tune, or dissonant, or one could legitimately say, microtonal or atonal, so ingrained has equal temperament become in the contemporary western ear. In contrast, to Japanese listeners of centuries past, their traditional music no doubt sounded familiar and right.
So when someone tries to invest a particular system of tonality from a particular arbitrary historical period with religious or political authority or an aura of inevitability or rightness, I understand the objections. This I think is the source of EdwardBast's objection to the phrase "weakening of tonality", and MillionRainbow's sensitivity to what he perceives as an attack on modernism, or the protection of Wagner from the accusation that his music was a precursor of modernism (which I didn't see in Woodduck's posts, but I'm not getting involved in that debate).
I think one can and should be able to discuss the evolution of western harmony, or tonality, or consonance, or dissonance, or atonality, without getting into these silly arguments. I recently read about some "scholar" who argues that abstract visual art, indeed any departure from certain hard and fast rules of artistic visual realism, is inherently wrong, using the example of Degas as one of the villains who was guilty of beginning to depart from those rules and culminating with the "any five-year old can paint a Jackson Pollock" idea.
There's really no arguing with someone who has made such a value judgment, so best to avoid such issues, in my opinion.


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## Woodduck

fluteman said:


> I recently read about some "scholar" who argues that abstract visual art, indeed any departure from certain hard and fast rules of artistic visual realism, is inherently wrong, using the example of Degas as one of the villains who was guilty of beginning to depart from those rules and culminating with the "any five-year old can paint a Jackson Pollock" idea.
> There's really no arguing with someone who has made such a value judgment, so best to avoid such issues, in my opinion.


That scholar didn't understand that the proof of the pudding is in the painting.

I know. That was awful.


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## fluteman

Woodduck said:


> That scholar didn't understand that the proof of the pudding is in the painting.
> 
> I know. That was awful.










Sticky Toffee Pudding With Creamy Custard. Artist: Eraclis Artistidou


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## Bettina

Woodduck said:


> ...As for Schoenberg's acceptance of historical determinism as a justification for what he was doing, it isn't "conservative" to reject that view, and to point out that Wagner himself, also a reader of Hegel, entertained no such notion about his harmonic adventurousness. *It's a very interesting fact about him, actually, that of all the elements of his art in which he was conscious of breaking new ground, the one about which he had almost nothing to say was harmony. *We might speculate on the oddity of that, give Wagner's compulsion to talk and write about almost everything else...


Actually, Wagner did make some intriguing remarks about harmony in _Opera and Drama_. He pointed out that the harmonic system was becoming gradually more expansive and wide-ranging: "From the Fundamental note of Harmony, Music had spread itself into a huge expanse of waters, in which the Absolute musician swam aimlessly and restless to and fro, until at least he lost his nerve: before him he saw nothing but an endless surge of possibilities."

He argued that music had reached a point where it needed to be supplemented with words, in order to clarify and ground its tonal wanderings: "Thus the musician was bound to wellnigh bewail his immoderate power of swimming; he yearned back to his primal homeland's quiet creeks....What moved him to this return, was nothing but the experienced aimlessness of his rovings on the high seas; to put it strictly, the admission that he possessed a faculty which he was unable to use: the Yearning for the Poet." The next several paragraphs discuss how Beethoven responded to this yearning in the Ninth Symphony; Wagner saw himself as continuing in this tradition with his own integration of words and music.

If you're interested in reading these passages in the full context, here's a link to the book (see pages 288-290): https://books.google.com/books?id=G...ner opera drama "harmonic modulation"&f=false

I find these passages fascinating because the remarks on harmony - though relatively brief - shed light on Wagner's attitude toward the loosening of the tonal system. The ever-increasing indeterminacy of the tonal language, in his opinion, had led to the death of absolute music. He suggested that words could provide the specificity that no longer existed within the musical language itself; opera was, for him, the most effective response to tonal attenuation.


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## Woodduck

Bettina said:


> Actually, Wagner did make some intriguing remarks about harmony in _Opera and Drama_. He pointed out that the harmonic system was becoming gradually more expansive and wide-ranging: "From the Fundamental note of Harmony, Music had spread itself into a huge expanse of waters, in which the Absolute musician swam aimlessly and restless to and fro, until at least he lost his nerve: before him he saw nothing but an endless surge of possibilities."
> 
> He argued that music had reached a point where it needed to be supplemented with words, in order to clarify and ground its tonal wanderings: "Thus the musician was bound to wellnigh bewail his immoderate power of swimming; he yearned back to his primal homeland's quiet creeks....What moved him to this return, was nothing but the experienced aimlessness of his rovings on the high seas; to put it strictly, the admission that he possessed a faculty which he was unable to use: the Yearning for the Poet." The next several paragraphs discuss how Beethoven responded to this yearning in the Ninth Symphony; Wagner saw himself as continuing in this tradition with his own integration of words and music.
> 
> If you're interested in reading these passages in the full context, here's a link to the book (see pages 288-290): https://books.google.com/books?id=G...ner opera drama "harmonic modulation"&f=false
> 
> I find these passages fascinating because the remarks on harmony - though relatively brief - shed light on Wagner's attitude toward the loosening of the tonal system. The ever-increasing indeterminacy of the tonal language, in his opinion, had led to the death of absolute music. He suggested that words could provide the specificity that no longer existed within the musical language itself; opera was, for him, the most effective response to tonal attenuation.


We need to be careful how we take Wagner's theorizing. In _Oper und Drama_ he expounds a notion that the various arts were, in ancient cultures, not separate but part of an all-encompassing uber-art, of which Greek drama was the paradigmatic example. He decided that his mission was to restore the original union of the arts in a _Gesamtkunstwerk_ ("total art work") which would help to unite his culture by presenting its basic values in a multi-sensory theatrical spectacle.

In order to explain and justify this project, he had to see music as having split off artificially from the other arts - from words and dramatic action - and had to find a way of talking about it as somehow incomplete in itself, increasingly so down through the ages. His idea was that music had evolved a wide range of expressive devices which could no longer find adequate justification or employment in absolute music, and he used Beethoven's Ninth as proof that even the greatest of composers had realized the necessity of reuniting music with the word.

This is quite typical of the self-justifying nature of Wagner's thought: he knew intuitively what he needed to do as an artist, and so his incredibly cunning and convoluted intellect created elaborate historical fictions in order to give his own work the status of historical necessity. There is much of value in _Oper und Drama_ for an understanding of Wagner's work, but of course the idea that absolute music had reached its effective end with Beethoven and that the Master of Bonn himself had sensed it and launched the Wagnerian era with his Ninth Symphony was absolute nonsense. Wagner went on to lead a performance of the Ninth to inaugurate the Bayreuth Festival in 1876, as if to thank his predecessor and don Beethoven's mantle in public.

My feeling (not having ploughed through _Oper und Drama_ as a whole) is that Wagner is not, in the passage you cite, talking about harmony as distinct from the other elements of music, but is describing the larger phenomenon of music's supposed incompleteness, saying that it is now too complex for absolute forms to encompass and that composers are now being lured into indulging in what he called "effects without causes" which need the word and the stage to rescue, redeem and justify them. Not surprisingly, Wagner could not adhere to this theory in practice. He gave away his underlying rationalization by saying once that he just couldn't seem to compose without a "poetic idea" to guide his inspiration. Contradicting this somewhat, he turned out a splendid piece of absolute music in the _Siegfried Idyll,_ and he even talked in late years about writing symphonies. Meanwhile he was encouraging to other composers of absolute music such as Bruckner and Sgambati, and once even complimented (grudgingly) Brahms (who returned the gesture when he thought no one was listening).

Wagner was always a bundle of contradictions who saved his consistency for his art. I guess if that's what it took to produce the operas, we can happily take the rest with a grain of salt.


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## fluteman

Woodduck said:


> This is quite typical of the self-justifying nature of Wagner's thought:


In this one sentence, you perfectly summarize the pervasive problem with much written discussion of music authored by composers. Nearly every word is colored, however subtly, by an underlying agenda of justifying their own musical decisions, or characterizing the music of others who fail to adopt their ideas as trivial, irrelevant, or simply bad. Even the most intelligent, articulate and talented writers among composers (Virgil Thomson, for one) repeatedly fall into this trap.


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## Woodduck

fluteman said:


> In this one sentence, you perfectly summarize the pervasive problem with much written discussion of music authored by composers. Nearly every word is colored, however subtly, by an underlying agenda of justifying their own musical decisions, or characterizing the music of others who fail to adopt their ideas as trivial, irrelevant, or simply bad. Even the most intelligent, articulate and talented writers among composers (Virgil Thomson, for one) repeatedly fall into this trap.


Heh heh. Thomson is notorious for his biases. His comments on Sibelius are immortal ("provincial beyond description"). Then there's Tchaikovsky on Brahms...


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## millionrainbows

Neward Thelman said:


> ...I avoid that term weakening, because it creates the impression that 19th cent composers has that as some sort of goal in and of itself, without any purpose. That's why I prefer to say expansion. 'Expanding' tonality is pretty much what they did.


"Expanding tonality" is like saying "enhanced interrogation." It depends on the bias; if one wishes to frame Wagner in terms of tonality, and stop there, then it puts everything that happens in the music into a perspective which ultimately looks backwards to its source, tonality.

If viewed with a different bias, "weakened tonality" (torture?) is a more preferred term for those who choose to see Wagner as a portent of things which followed.

I'm really not concerned with Wagner's intent, as I am not a professed Wagnerian; only in the changes wrought in the language itself, from a more objective historical perspective.


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## millionrainbows

fluteman said:


> Ironically, the system of western harmony that Wagner expanded upon and Schoenberg so dramatically (but not really) rejected was a relatively recent innovation in formal western music, having its roots in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, when the diatonic scale was developed, and first the fifth and then the third were accepted as consonant.


Tonality in its most developed form was a relatively recent phenomenon. Yet, "modernism" (read: music produced outside of the tonal system) is frequently dismissed as being "rootless" and reductionist. Actually, what Schoenberg did during his "free atonal" period, and later formalized into 12-tone, was to return to methods from the past which were pre-harmonic: polyphony and to thematic procedures.



> So when someone tries to invest a particular system of tonality from a particular arbitrary historical period with religious or political authority or an aura of inevitability or rightness, I understand the objections.


Historically inevitable or not, the musical inevitability and its net result is the same.

In late Wagner, tonality is no longer heard as definite, and becomes suspended and floating, with no resolution to speak of. Diminished scales and chords, and augmented, begin to be experienced not adjuncts of tonality, but ends unto themselves.

The chromatic techniques of Wagner begin to manifest as aspects of the total chromatic. Adjacent whole-tone scales, as well as cycles of thirds and fourths, will generate the complete chromatic gamut.



> This I think is the source of…(the)... objection to the phrase "weakening of tonality", and MillionRainbow's sensitivity to what he perceives as an attack on modernism, or the protection of Wagner from the accusation that his music was a precursor of modernism.


Well, tonality is either experienced as being strong, or weak (expanded). Isn't this the appeal of Wagner?

If I am protecting anything, it is my own preference to view music and music history from my own chosen perspective, which is forward-looking rather than traditionally entrenched, without it being nit-picked to death.



> I think one can and should be able to discuss the evolution of western harmony, or tonality, or consonance, or dissonance, or atonality, without getting into these silly arguments.


Careful with the term "evolution."


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## millionrainbows

Bettina said:


> Actually, Wagner did make some intriguing remarks about harmony in _Opera and Drama_. He pointed out that the harmonic system was becoming gradually more expansive and wide-ranging: "From the Fundamental note of Harmony, Music had spread itself into a huge expanse of waters, in which the Absolute musician swam aimlessly and restless to and fro, until at least he lost his nerve: before him he saw nothing but an endless surge of possibilities."
> 
> He argued that music had reached a point where it needed to be supplemented with words, in order to clarify and ground its tonal wanderings: "Thus the musician was bound to wellnigh bewail his immoderate power of swimming; he yearned back to his primal homeland's quiet creeks....What moved him to this return, was nothing but the experienced aimlessness of his rovings on the high seas; to put it strictly, the admission that he possessed a faculty which he was unable to use: the Yearning for the Poet." The next several paragraphs discuss how Beethoven responded to this yearning in the Ninth Symphony; Wagner saw himself as continuing in this tradition with his own integration of words and music...
> 
> ...I find these passages fascinating because the remarks on harmony - though relatively brief - shed light on Wagner's attitude toward the loosening of the tonal system. The ever-increasing indeterminacy of the tonal language, in his opinion, had led to the death of absolute music. He suggested that words could provide the specificity that no longer existed within the musical language itself; opera was, for him, the most effective response to tonal attenuation.


Wagner's use of leitmotifs reinforce this: thematic, melodic constructs which give identity and meaning when tonal direction, tonal motion, support, and superstructure, which are normally assumed, have been weakened (expanded). This is right in line with what happens in free-atonal Schoenberg: themes and thematic development still occur, and assume the structural force formerly exerted by tonal function and expectation. In the waning of harmony, the linear must emerge, as naturally as yin and yang.


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## Bettina

millionrainbows said:


> Wagner's use of leitmotifs reinforce this: thematic, melodic constructs which give identity and meaning when tonal direction, tonal motion, support, and superstructure, which are normally assumed, have been weakened (expanded). This is right in line with what happens in free-atonal Schoenberg: themes and thematic development still occur, and assume the structural force formerly exerted by tonal function and expectation. In the waning of harmony, the linear must emerge, as naturally as yin and yang.


I agree - Wagner's motivic development (tied in his case to the dramatic and psychological meanings of the libretto) allowed him to employ a highly chromatic harmonic language without any loss of unity. This is one of the reasons why I consider Schoenberg to be one of Wagner's successors: both composers worked with motivic cells as a vehicle for producing integrated structures. Instead of using tonal cadences and modulations as a way of articulating the structure of a work, they used variations and restatements of motivic material. In places where a tonal composer might use a tonic cadence to mark the end of a section, Wagner (and later Schoenberg) often used thematic restatement instead.


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## fluteman

millionrainbows said:


> Careful with the term "evolution."


Ouch. I thought I was helping you out, "evolve" meaning "develop, progress, advance; mature, grow, expand, spread; alter, change, transform, adapt, metamorphose". "Expand" seems to be the word you prefer, and there it is, one of the dictionary synonyms.
Anyway, I like your point about Schoenberg returning to the pre-harmony age. An interesting way of looking at it. I'd suggest that other modernists have even more obvious ties to early music. 
And I'm all for looking forward. But I dare not even talk about that in this Wagner thread. ;-)


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## Woodduck

fluteman said:


> Ouch. I thought I was helping you out, "evolve" meaning "develop, progress, advance; mature, grow, expand, spread; alter, change, transform, adapt, metamorphose". "Expand" seems to be the word you prefer, and there it is, one of the dictionary synonyms.
> Anyway, I like your point about Schoenberg returning to the pre-harmony age. An interesting way of looking at it. I'd suggest that other modernists have even more obvious ties to early music.
> And *I'm all for looking forward. **But I dare not even talk about that in this Wagner thread.* ;-)


Why not? Wagner was always looking forward.


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## Woodduck

The preference for "expanded tonality" over "weakened tonality" as a description of Wagner's treatment of harmony isn't motivated by any historical bias but by a desire to be specific about the nature and effect of his music, and to account for its expressive power.

"Weakened" has a negative implication: something has lessened or declined. Obviously Wagner's deployment of the components of tonal harmony took him far outside the symmetrical structures which had evolved out of tonal thinking (tonic to dominant and back, exposition-development-recap in the appropriate keys, etc.), but that in itself doesn't mean his thinking was "less tonal," or harmonically "weak" in any sense. Wagner's harmony exhibits an intense sense of purpose and direction. Tonality retains its hold even when the destination is uncertain, changes frequently, or never arrives; tonal tension can actually be heightened, and the expressive power of tonality increased, by delays, detours and ambiguities. In this sense Wagner tested the strength of tonality by showing how much stress it could bear, and firm harmonic resolution, when it arrives (as it inevitably does), is an event of great force and significance.

_In late Wagner, tonality is no longer heard as definite, and becomes suspended and floating, with no resolution to speak of. Diminished scales and chords, and augmented, begin to be experienced not adjuncts of tonality, but ends unto themselves._ (Milionrainbows)

This is not my experience of Wagner's music. In fact, it sounds more like a description of Debussy. It's rare in Wagner that chords of any sort are experienced as "ends in themselves" and not as part of a tonal progression, regardless of how uncertain, for the moment, the goal of that progression might be. Wagner's harmony almost always resolves to something - or, when the implied destination is omitted, suggests or asks for a resolution (as in the dominant sevenths at the ends of the reiterated phrase that opens _Tristan und Isolde_). Perhaps the most tonally unstable passages in his music are to be found in _Parsifal,_ a prime example being the strange, insinuating music to which Kundry seduces Parsifal. Here, chords, unmoored from a fixed key and only distantly related to each other, may succeed each other rapidly; heard as isolated events, the chord changes seem to imply changes of key almost from chord to chord. But in the long view these chords are nodes, bound together by the smoothest of chromatic voice-leading into larger spans which ultimately "explain" the logic of the sequence. Rarely are the harmonic nodes left to function as "ends in themselves."

By his ability to keep distant goals firmly in mind while taking us on harmonic adventures that make irrelevant our usual formal expectations and accustomed analytic categories, Wagner produced a flexible, fluid music that bypassed the intellectual processes which had been an important part of the listening experience in earlier music, breaking down the sense of "aesthetic distance" between the perceiver and the perceived, and giving many listeners the oft-reported feeling (welcome or not, according to temperament) of being overwhelmed - or, if they dislike the experience, violated. While it isn't only through harmony that Wagner's music tries to "get to us" in a direct and visceral way, it's the far-flung deployment of tonality to create intuitively coherent structures whose nuts and bolts vanish behind their own intense expressivity that makes us vulnerable to the spell of Klingsor, if we allow ourselves to yield to him without reservations.

To speak of the "weakening of tonality" in historical terms is reasonable, if we look at what certain important composers heavily influenced by Wagnerian harmony saw in it and did with it. It isn't easy to achieve coherence in a highly chromatic idiom; you actually have to maintain a strong sense of tonality to do it, and the temptation to wander off into chromatic thickets can be strong (witness Reger). But this would take me beyond the matter I want to discuss, and keep me up too late tonight.


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## fluteman

Woodduck said:


> Why not? Wagner was always looking forward.


Indeed. But Wagner lived from 1813 to 1883. Since then, much has happened in western music and western culture generally. I do respect revolutionary innovators from any era, e.g., Chaucer, Shakespeare, Flaubert, Proust, Joyce, Pound, Rembrandt, Titian, Van Gogh, Degas, Picasso, Klee, Haydn, Beethoven, Berlioz, Debussy, Stravinsky, etc., etc. But art has, er, evolved (expanded?) since the time of all of those long deceased great artists.


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## Woodduck

fluteman said:


> Indeed. But Wagner lived from 1813 to 1883. Since then, much has happened in western music and western culture generally. I do respect revolutionary innovators from any era, e.g., Chaucer, Shakespeare, Flaubert, Proust, Joyce, Pound, Rembrandt, Titian, Van Gogh, Degas, Picasso, Klee, Haydn, Beethoven, Berlioz, Debussy, Stravinsky, etc., etc. But art has, er, evolved (expanded?) since the time of all of those long deceased great artists.


What's your point? Mine was that I didn't see why you said "I'm all for looking forward. But I dare not even talk about that in this Wagner thread." Who would want to stop you?


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## fluteman

Woodduck said:


> What's your point? Mine was that I didn't see why you said "I'm all for looking forward. But I dare not even talk about that in this Wagner thread." Who would want to stop you?


I was just kiddin' a bit about all the testiness that somehow surfaces here and in other classical music discussion groups when certain subjects are discussed, very much including the music of Richard Wagner. I've never really understood it myself. He's obviously a great and unique composer, though you need to be willing to sit in one place for several hours to take in his lengthy operas, something people in this day and age are no longer accustomed to doing.
Here's a quick story that I hope will amuse but at least won't offend you from my family history: My parents, classical music fanatics always, were once sitting through a Met production of Meistersinger. Alas, they hadn't thought of dining beforehand. Towards the end of the opera, my father leaned towards my mother and sang, sotto voce, to the famous theme that opens the Prelude to Act 1 and returns (very) repeatedly: "You take the girl! I'm going to get a roast beef sandwich."
Playing that music in my college orchestra, I had great difficulty keeping a straight face.


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## millionrainbows

fluteman said:


> Ironically, the system of western harmony that Wagner expanded upon...was a relatively recent innovation in formal western music, having its roots in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, when the diatonic scale was developed, and first the fifth and then the third were accepted as consonant...Wagner's innovations in harmonic ambiguity grow out of the developments of late Beethoven and Chopin from earlier in the same (19th) century...So when someone tries to invest a particular system of tonality from a particular arbitrary historical period with religious or political authority or an aura of inevitability or rightness, I understand the objections. This I think is the source of…(the)...objection to the phrase "weakening of tonality"…and to what what is perceived)...as the protection of (Wagner's music) from the (perception) that his music was a precursor of modernism


Aside from history and personalities, the musical principles are there which support the fact that tonality was moving further and further away from its originally intended aim; to establish a tonal center with an hierarchy. Call this expansion if you must, but from an examination of the actual mechanics, it appears more as a convolution going inward, away from expansion, into smaller and smaller iterations and relations.

The circle of fifths is presented as representing key areas. Going clockwise, we step gradually away by fifths into related new areas, in order of their relatedness. Going counter-clockwise, we go by fourths to the next most-related key areas.

A fifth is 7 half-steps; a fourth is 5 half-steps. If you cycle fifths, this eventually yields the complete chromatic; C-G-D-A-E-B-F#-C#-G#-D#-A#. Likewise with fourths.

12 is not divisible by 7 and 5; you must use a larger denominator, 7x12=84, and 5x12=60. They do not cycle within the chromatic octave, but must 'go outside' the octave before finally re-connecting and resolving. This is why tonality is based on root movement by fifths; these naturally travel "away" from the tonic station in the most far-reaching and effective way. Thus, modulation to new keys is facilitated by V-I movements. 5 and 7 are the only two numbers of half-steps (besides 1) which generate the entire chromatic of 12 different notes.

Cycles of 3 (minor third) and 4 (major third) are recursive; they do not cycle the chromatic, but repeat in smaller patterns: 3, 6, 9, 12 (12/4) and 4, 8, 12 (12/3).

Minor thirds are the diminished scale, major thirds are the augmented. Thus, when Wagner uses diminished chords to suspend harmonic movement, he is presenting 4 possibilities of resolution, or with augmented, 3 possibilities.

This is an "expansion of possibilities", but it is also a "shrinking" of the tonal vista. The possibilities of root movement and resolution become subject to smaller "in-octave" parameters of the 3 and 4-based structures, structures which do not 'expand' but instead are confined to "in-octave" cycles which are by nature recursive and repeating, not expansive in the maximum sense.

This recursive nature of the symmetrical intervals of 1, 3, 4, and 6 is exactly what modernism exploited, using Bartok as an example. This created "local" tone centers, but did not encourage travel outside the chromatic.

Wagner remained tonal by "faith," not by actual mechanics. His harmony was "expanded" to possibilities which had several possible tonal meanings or resolutions. The diminished, in one possibility, can be considered to resolve into one of four possible V7 chords, which can relate to four different I's or key areas. This in itself is vague; and if he did not resolve, then we are left circling in recursive patterns of 3 and 4, which is not 'expansion,' but is tighter and tighter spiraling inside a chromatic pattern.

It is necessary to "believe" that there is tonality in the most radical Wagner, because it is not demonstrated clearly; it is a range of possibilities which are not made definitive. We take it "on faith" in our expectations, that the music will resolve, or has a home key. There is still contention as to what the "Tristan Chord" means, or how it functions or resolves. Each per on has a different "belief" as to its nature.

The chromatic does not "expand" tonality; it weakens it to the point that it no longer functions as it was originally intended to function. The hierarchy has no triangular structure any more; it is now a tribal circle. Wagner crossed a line into modernism.


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## Woodduck

fluteman said:


> I was just kiddin' a bit about all the testiness that somehow surfaces here and in other classical music discussion groups when certain subjects are discussed, very much including the music of Richard Wagner. I've never really understood it myself. He's obviously a great and unique composer, though you need to be willing to sit in one place for several hours to take in his lengthy operas, something people in this day and age are no longer accustomed to doing.
> Here's a quick story that I hope will amuse but at least won't offend you from my family history: My parents, classical music fanatics always, were once sitting through a Met production of Meistersinger. Alas, they hadn't thought of dining beforehand. Towards the end of the opera, my father leaned towards my mother and sang, sotto voce, to the famous theme that opens the Prelude to Act 1 and returns (very) repeatedly: "You take the girl! I'm going to get a roast beef sandwich."
> Playing that music in my college orchestra, I had great difficulty keeping a straight face.


Great anecdote. But I'm amazed that anyone would anticipate a five-hour evening with nothing in his stomach! It's tricky though. You don't want to eat so much that you get sleepy. I'm afraid nothing would help me at my age: put me in a darkened auditorium with plushy seats and within a couple of hours I'm probably off to dreamland no matter what the show is. One act at a time in front of the stereo with a cup of coffee is now the wiser course.


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## Woodduck

millionrainbows said:


> Aside from history and personalities, the musical principles are there which support the fact that tonality was moving further and further away from its originally intended aim; to establish a tonal center with an hierarchy. Call this expansion if you must, but from an examination of the actual mechanics, it appears more as a convolution going inward, away from expansion, into smaller and smaller iterations and relations.
> 
> The circle of fifths is presented as representing key areas. Going clockwise, we step gradually away by fifths into related new areas, in order of their relatedness. Going counter-clockwise, we go by fourths to the next most-related key areas.
> 
> A fifth is 7 half-steps; a fourth is 5 half-steps. If you cycle fifths, this eventually yields the complete chromatic; C-G-D-A-E-B-F#-C#-G#-D#-A#. Likewise with fourths.
> 
> 12 is not divisible by 7 and 5; you must use a larger denominator, 7x12=84, and 5x12=60. They do not cycle within the chromatic octave, but must 'go outside' the octave before finally re-connecting and resolving. This is why tonality is based on root movement by fifths; these naturally travel "away" from the tonic station in the most far-reaching and effective way. Thus, modulation to new keys is facilitated by V-I movements. 5 and 7 are the only two numbers of half-steps (besides 1) which generate the entire chromatic of 12 different notes.
> 
> Cycles of 3 (minor third) and 4 (major third) are recursive; they do not cycle the chromatic, but repeat in smaller patterns: 3, 6, 9, 12 (12/4) and 4, 8, 12 (12/3).
> 
> Minor thirds are the diminished scale, major thirds are the augmented. Thus, when Wagner uses diminished chords to suspend harmonic movement, he is presenting 4 possibilities of resolution, or with augmented, 3 possibilities.
> 
> This is an "expansion of possibilities", but it is also a "shrinking" of the tonal vista. The possibilities of root movement and resolution become subject to smaller "in-octave" parameters of the 3 and 4-based structures, structures which do not 'expand' but instead are confined to "in-octave" cycles which are by nature recursive and repeating, not expansive in the maximum sense.
> 
> This recursive nature of the symmetrical intervals of 1, 3, 4, and 6 is exactly what modernism exploited, using Bartok as an example. This created "local" tone centers, but did not encourage travel outside the chromatic.
> 
> Wagner remained tonal by "faith," not by actual mechanics. His harmony was "expanded" to possibilities which had several possible tonal meanings or resolutions. The diminished, in one possibility, can be considered to resolve into one of four possible V7 chords, which can relate to four different I's or key areas. This in itself is vague; and if he did not resolve, then we are left circling in recursive patterns of 3 and 4, which is not 'expansion,' but is tighter and tighter spiraling inside a chromatic pattern.
> 
> It is necessary to "believe" that there is tonality in the most radical Wagner, because it is not demonstrated clearly; it is a range of possibilities which are not made definitive. We take it "on faith" in our expectations, that the music will resolve, or has a home key. There is still contention as to what the "Tristan Chord" means, or how it functions or resolves. Each per on has a different "belief" as to its nature.
> 
> The chromatic does not "expand" tonality; it weakens it to the point that it no longer functions as it was originally intended to function. The hierarchy has no triangular structure any more; it is now a tribal circle. Wagner crossed a line into modernism.


I appreciate the nuts and bolts of this presentation, showing how certain chords are ambiguous by nature. Those chords - diminished or augmented - can, however, be given more specific functions in the context of actual music. In fact, it's possible to use such chords in contexts which so restrict their possible use that they become tonally unambiguous: they really must resolve in the way that they do in order for the music to make sense. Since we're talking about the actual music of Wagner, it would be helpful to refer to examples typifying his use of them, in order to see how much ambiguity these chords retain, and how much they actually represent "a range of possibilities which are not made definitive." This is obviously difficult to do here. But I would suggest that the opening bars of _Tristan_ are a perfect example of Wagner's usual practice, which is to create, for expressive purposes, feelings of tonal uncertainty in a context which, upon analysis, proves to be firmly grounded in tonal syntax. Such grounding was always considered essential to the feeling of coherence and inevitability which are the mark of good composing, and Wagner, as a pretty good composer, had no interest in drifting rudderless in a sea of harmonic ambiguity.

There may remain some controversy about the famous "Tristan chord" and what it "is" as it first strikes the ear, but what it really is _in context_ is not hard to understand at all, and I don't think there's any longer much debate about it. Wagner's key signatures are not chosen arbitrarily: this prelude begins in C-major/a-minor. And if we keep that in mind, the reiteration at different tonal levels of the work's opening bars, and their final resolution through the subdominant of C-major to the ensuing C-major melody, are seen to constitute a fundamentally tonal progression, beginning in a-minor, traversing closely related tonal areas, and finally landing in C. What impresses me most about what Wagner does here (and elsewhere) is not how striking his harmonies are (after all, other composers had used these chords) but rather how much momentary ambiguity he can create while maintaining the feeling that the music is not arbitrary - that it's going exactly the way it has to go. The acute sense of tonality necessary to achieve this over unprecedented time spans was probably Wagner's supreme musical gift, and although his more extreme chromaticism may have had the historical effect of inspiring other composers to jettison the tonal underpinnings of harmony, it was never (so far as we know) in his mind to do any such thing. I'm unconvinced, therefore, that "Wagner remained tonal by 'faith,' not by actual mechanics," or that "it is necessary to 'believe' that there is tonality in the most radical Wagner, because it is not demonstrated clearly; it is a range of possibilities which are not made definitive." The "actual mechanics" of the _Tristan _prelude are there in black and white, and they show a firm tonal substructure, the substructure that Wagner needed to lift ambiguous chords, chromatic alterations and deceptive resolutions out of the ocean of "possibilities" and give them purpose and direction which is as "definitive" as music can manifest.

While composing the extraordinary prelude to Act 3 of _Parsifal,_ Wagner said to Cosima that he felt as though he were "reinventing music." There are passages in that work of a chromatic complexity and subtlety beyond anything ever heard before. So did he "cross a line into modernism"? I'd say that depends how you define modernism and where you think the line is located (and if you think there is one). To my ear, the increasing use of ambiguous chords and chromatic movement in melody and harmony in Romantic music reaches nothing that could properly be called a line until Debussy's readiness to go outside the diatonic/chromatic scale and to set chords free to float in the ether, on the one hand, and, on the other, Schoenberg's drive to "emancipate the dissonance" from its place in harmony's hierarchy, a hierarchy that Wagner, good son of Palestrina, Bach and Beethoven, saw not as imprisoning music but as enabling ever-expanding expressive possibilities.


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## millionrainbows

The Tristan chord is more significant than its ambiguity, or its function. If you look it up on WIK, the matter is definitely not resolved. It is still thought of as a curiosity today, and it has its own WIK page.

Regardless of its function or context, the Tristan chord is perceived as a 'harmonic entity' unto itself. It has a 'declamatory' effect. This sort of declamatory 'aural harmonic object' shows up later in R. Strauss' Elektra, and Salome, which are still tonal works.

Mahler makes use of a declamatory chord with what I call his "heart attack" chord in the 10th; and Schoenberg has a loud, dissonant, shocking chord in Pelleas und Mellisande, which recurs several times.

The Tristan chord is just one example of the actual, written-out mechanics of Wagner's music which resist clear analysis. One guess is as good as any other.

Debussy did not cross much of a line with his modernism. All he did was create 'new synthetic tonalities' which lay outside the purview of the major/minor system. The materials, even the way he used the whole tone scale, still had hierarchies, and therefore functions, and are therefore nothing more than a 'different ' kind of the same old tonality. It just didn't have the same kind of development over time, which seems to be what Wagner is so lauded for.

Chromaticism doesn't have much real power, if all you intend or expect it to do is resolve from a diminished ambiguity to one of four possible Vs, and then to one of four possible tonics. Root movement and chord function is what really gives tonality its identity and power; if those functions and that hierarchy based on the diatonic scale are weakened by diminished sevenths and other intervals of root movement, the music is rightly seen as a chromatic 'synthetic' tonality of a different sort, as unrelated to CP tonality as Debussy is; maybe to a slightly lesser degree.

Wagner did not 'extend' tonality; he merely did what all other modernists like Debussy and Stravinsky did: he created his own brand of tonality which lay outside the strict bounds of what can be rightly considered the major/minor diatonic tonal system.

In the most radical Wagner, where he was 'reinventing music,' all he was doing was leaving the diatonic scale behind, and immersing himself into the chromatic, into which he seemed most comfortable dividing it into 3 parts, namely, the diminished chord. That's his "brand," that was his solution to being 'modern.'

Other modernist composers like Ernest Bloch, and parts of Bartok, simply dropped the tonal pretense and descended into what I call "diminished-itis."

So how many ways can you divide a chromatic scale? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6: the rest are inversions. 4 and 5 are already covered by traditional tonality; that leaves us with 1, 2, 3, and 6.

Debussy's use of "2" (the whole tone scale) is nothing more than an alternate tonality, with the ambiguity built-in.

In Voiles, Debussy is simply using the whole tone scale for its harmonic implications. The WT scale is not "atonal" but is ambiguous; that's a crucial distinction. The WT scale has 7 notes and is totally symmetrical, so it can have 7 possible "roots" or tonics, if one wishes. Note at the end how the bass note underneath "anchors" the whole thing to a "root."

Debussy was interested in exploiting the harmonic possibilities of the WT scale to create a sense of "tonality"; Schoenberg was not, in his free atonal and 12-tone works. If he used it, he was always more interested in the WT scale as representing the total chromatic gamut in more motivic and melodic/thematic ways, not as creating a "tonal hierarchy" out of a scale.

The _real_ modernist is, therefore, Schoenberg and the 'atonal' music approaches which grew out of that, because they escape the confines of harmonically-derived "tonalities" which are limited to six possibilities of interval projection. With motivic and thematically-derived structures, the possibilities are greater.

Schoenberg may have been influenced by Wagner more in his early years. Later, the harmonic aspects of Wagner had been taken up in other ways by Debussy and others.

I reserve the use of "atonal" to refer to music which does not attempt to create harmonic tonalities from scales, _any_ scales. Atonal music uses motives and thematic devices, and does not create hierarchies of harmonic function from any kind of scale.


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## fluteman

millionrainbows said:


> Aside from history and personalities, the musical principles are there which support the fact that tonality was moving further and further away from its originally intended aim; to establish a tonal center with an hierarchy. Call this expansion if you must, but from an examination of the actual mechanics, it appears more as a convolution going inward, away from expansion, into smaller and smaller iterations and relations.
> 
> The circle of fifths is presented as representing key areas. Going clockwise, we step gradually away by fifths into related new areas, in order of their relatedness. Going counter-clockwise, we go by fourths to the next most-related key areas.
> 
> A fifth is 7 half-steps; a fourth is 5 half-steps. If you cycle fifths, this eventually yields the complete chromatic; C-G-D-A-E-B-F#-C#-G#-D#-A#. Likewise with fourths.
> 
> 12 is not divisible by 7 and 5; you must use a larger denominator, 7x12=84, and 5x12=60. They do not cycle within the chromatic octave, but must 'go outside' the octave before finally re-connecting and resolving. This is why tonality is based on root movement by fifths; these naturally travel "away" from the tonic station in the most far-reaching and effective way. Thus, modulation to new keys is facilitated by V-I movements. 5 and 7 are the only two numbers of half-steps (besides 1) which generate the entire chromatic of 12 different notes.
> 
> Cycles of 3 (minor third) and 4 (major third) are recursive; they do not cycle the chromatic, but repeat in smaller patterns: 3, 6, 9, 12 (12/4) and 4, 8, 12 (12/3).
> 
> Minor thirds are the diminished scale, major thirds are the augmented. Thus, when Wagner uses diminished chords to suspend harmonic movement, he is presenting 4 possibilities of resolution, or with augmented, 3 possibilities.
> 
> This is an "expansion of possibilities", but it is also a "shrinking" of the tonal vista. The possibilities of root movement and resolution become subject to smaller "in-octave" parameters of the 3 and 4-based structures, structures which do not 'expand' but instead are confined to "in-octave" cycles which are by nature recursive and repeating, not expansive in the maximum sense.
> 
> This recursive nature of the symmetrical intervals of 1, 3, 4, and 6 is exactly what modernism exploited, using Bartok as an example. This created "local" tone centers, but did not encourage travel outside the chromatic.
> 
> Wagner remained tonal by "faith," not by actual mechanics. His harmony was "expanded" to possibilities which had several possible tonal meanings or resolutions. The diminished, in one possibility, can be considered to resolve into one of four possible V7 chords, which can relate to four different I's or key areas. This in itself is vague; and if he did not resolve, then we are left circling in recursive patterns of 3 and 4, which is not 'expansion,' but is tighter and tighter spiraling inside a chromatic pattern.
> 
> It is necessary to "believe" that there is tonality in the most radical Wagner, because it is not demonstrated clearly; it is a range of possibilities which are not made definitive. We take it "on faith" in our expectations, that the music will resolve, or has a home key. There is still contention as to what the "Tristan Chord" means, or how it functions or resolves. Each per on has a different "belief" as to its nature.
> 
> The chromatic does not "expand" tonality; it weakens it to the point that it no longer functions as it was originally intended to function. The hierarchy has no triangular structure any more; it is now a tribal circle. Wagner crossed a line into modernism.


I enjoy these harmonious posts of yours, millionrainbows. I once found a very minor typo in one of them, and almost called your attention to it, not to prove I'm such a smarty pants, but to show I'm reading and paying attention. But when you say tonality "no longer functions as it was originally intended to function", I think you need to be careful about the word "intended". Western harmony developed over several centuries in a rather ad hoc manner. As soon as intervals other than unisons were deemed acceptable, we were on a path that inevitably led away from tonal centers and towards more harmonic ambiguity. And modern music hasn't completely abandoned the concept of tonal centers that essentially function as they have for centuries (OK, some of it has), it's just that the concept overall is less central and pervasive than it was in the previous four or five centuries.


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## fluteman

Woodduck said:


> One act at a time in front of the stereo with a cup of coffee is now the wiser course.


Truer words were never spoken (or written [ed.]).


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## Woodduck

The Tristan chord is more significant than its ambiguity, or its function. If you look it up on WIK, the matter is definitely not resolved. It is still thought of as a curiosity today. Regardless of its function or context, the Tristan chord is perceived as a 'harmonic entity' unto itself. It has a 'declamatory' effect. 

True, there are still arguments. I find most of them to be ivory-tower contrivances that inadequately reflect what is either seen or heard. It just isn't that complicated. Yes, the chord is provocative. Plenty of effects in music, from earliest times, have significances beyond what we can deduce from their functions, if they even have functions. Sometimes, as in Gesualdo and even in chromatic passages in Bach, there is no tonal function discernible, and the immediate, dramatic effect of the harmonies is all that matters (the "declamatory" effect you note). Wagner chooses in the _Tristan_ chord to give an unprepared dissonant apoggiatura an emphasis that obscures the function of the chord to which it belongs; it's a daring move at the start of a piece. But the "mystery note" that gives people the willies remains an apoggiatura, and it resolves upward through a perfectly familiar augmented sixth chord in a recognizable tonal context. The ambiguous dissonance is powerful, but tonality asserts its prerogatives in the iterations that follow, until C-major finally emerges.

Debussy did not cross much of a line with his modernism. All he did was create 'new synthetic tonalities' which lay outside the purview of the major/minor system. The materials, even the way he used the whole tone scale, still had hierarchies, and therefore functions, and are therefore nothing more than a 'different ' kind of the same old tonality.

Debussy's harmony less "modernist" than Wagner's? An interesting perspective, and I'd sort of like to give King Richard credit for that, but I don't think I can. I think we agree on how tonality is defined and when it's absent, and I agree that the whole tone scale as Debussy uses it is not atonal. But it's hardly a form of "the same old tonality." I hear Wagner firmly rooted in common practice, with the dominant-tonic relationship still fundamental and traditional ideas of voice leading still controlling, while Debussy is stepping outside the system into other modes and syntaxes, and reveling in nonfunctional harmonies and sensuous sonic textures that justify themselves. There are certainly passages in Wagner that presage Debussy, though; in fact, without Wagner there would be no Debussy.

If those functions and that hierarchy based on the diatonic scale are weakened by diminished sevenths and other intervals of root movement, the music is rightly seen as a chromatic 'synthetic' tonality of a different sort, as unrelated to CP tonality as Debussy is; maybe to a slightly lesser degree. Wagner did not 'extend' tonality; he merely did what all other modernists like Debussy and Stravinsky did: he created his own brand of tonality which lay outside the strict bounds of what can be rightly considered the major/minor diatonic tonal system.


Again, I don't see Wagner's harmony as a new brand of tonality unrelated to common practice, but mostly as an elaboration and extension of it. The dominant-tonic progression with its leading tone remains ubiquitous, regardless of how much it's obscured or how long we're kept waiting for major resolutions.

All he was doing was leaving the diatonic scale behind, and immersing himself into the chromatic, into which he seemed most comfortable dividing it into 3 parts, namely, the diminished chord. That's his "brand," that was his solution to being 'modern.'Other modernist composers like Ernest Bloch, and parts of Bartok, simply dropped the tonal pretense and descended into what I call "diminished-itis."

I'm sure that Wagner was not looking for a solution to being modern, and that, if he has a "brand," it consists of something more ambitious than diminished chords! Wagner's tonality was not a "pretense," and the fact that it didn't sever relations with its diatonic ancestry is precisely what makes his chromaticism work. Without it you get Bloch's "diminished-itis," or maybe the convoluted meandering of Reger - or the (choose your descriptor according to taste) of atonality.


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## Woodduck

fluteman said:


> I enjoy these harmonious posts of yours, millionrainbows. I once found a very minor typo in one of them, and almost called your attention to it, not to prove I'm such a smarty pants, but to show I'm reading and paying attention. But when you say tonality "no longer functions as it was originally intended to function", I think you need to be careful about the word "intended". Western harmony developed over several centuries in a rather ad hoc manner. As soon as intervals other than unisons were deemed acceptable, we were on a path that inevitably led away from tonal centers and towards more harmonic ambiguity. And *modern music hasn't completely abandoned the concept of tonal centers that essentially function as they have for centuries (OK, some of it has), it's just that the concept overall is less central and pervasive than it was in the previous four or five centuries.*


It's is liberating, isn't it, not to have to bang out tonic-dominant-tonic-dominant -tonic-dominant-tonic-dominant-tonic just to be sure the piece is over? :clap:


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## KenOC

Woodduck said:


> It's is liberating, isn't it, not to have to bang out tonic-dominant-tonic-dominant -tonic-dominant-tonic-dominant-tonic just to be sure the piece is over? :clap:


Hey, let up on the dissing Beethoven! :scold:


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## millionrainbows

fluteman said:


> ...when you say tonality "no longer functions as it was originally intended to function", I think you need to be careful about the word "intended". Western harmony developed over several centuries in a rather ad hoc manner. As soon as intervals other than unisons were deemed acceptable, we were on a path that inevitably led away from tonal centers and towards more harmonic ambiguity. And modern music hasn't completely abandoned the concept of tonal centers that essentially function as they have for centuries (OK, some of it has), it's just that the concept overall is less central and pervasive than it was in the previous four or five centuries.


Maybe I should say "as it was originally designed to function," with a 7-note diatonic scale. As soon as all 12 notes are in play, tonality is "fully extended," and Wagner has no exclusive claim to this. In fact, I think a big mistake is to say that Debussy is not just another case of 'extended tonality,' because his music was almost totally harmonically derived. His greatest innovations were in other areas, but not harmony or tonality, IMO.

Some sort of tonality will be the result of any instance in which scales are used to create an hierarchy.

There are tonal centers everywhere, in almost every kind of music, popular, folk, and ethnic included.



> Western harmony developed over several centuries in a rather ad hoc manner. As soon as intervals other than unisons were deemed acceptable, we were on a path that inevitably led away from tonal centers and towards more harmonic ambiguity.


I see what you are trying to say, but this seems to go all the way back to chant, and that is too far. Besides, chant was melodic, not harmonic. Harmony, as well, had to develop during the medieval and Renaissance.

So let's start from square one of harmony, when it became harmony (whatever year that was), with the major scale.

I see the original design of the major scale itself, as what led us away from the tonal center of C.

The major scale is the crux of Western tonality, the chosen scale to accomplish little excursions away from, and back to tonic. For this reason, I don't think tonality was ever intended to function much beyond that, and was designed to travel away from tonic.

The major scale is inherently dissonant, and was designed that way on purpose. This is easily demonstrated at the keyboard, preferably an electric one which can sustain notes like an organ.

Start stacking fifths, starting from C: C-G-D-A-E-B-F#. It sounds fine and shimmering, like fifths should. If you use the notes of the C major scale, and end with *F* instead, it sound terrible. You will notice that the F sounds dissonant compared to F#, because of the tritone between B and F.

Go through the scale, C-D-E-*F*. This reinforces F as a new tonic, and does not reinforce C, which is our scale key. This is counter-intuitive; a scale should reinforce its home tonality, not weaken it.
The second half, G-A-B-*C*, does reinforce C as tonic.

That's why the "flawed" major scale is destined for restlessness, for travel _away _from tonic to other root stations, like C to F. It is not the strongest possible scale for reinforcing a tonality.


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## millionrainbows

Common practice tonality has no exclusive claim to the V-I relation, because this is a universal harmonic device that is inherent in all harmonic sound. It's derived from the fifth as being the most prominent harmonic after the octave. Any triad with a fifth will gain a sense of stability from this. Even Indian raga's tamboura drone-instrument is tuned in fifths to give this stability. All tone-centered music uses the fifth as its anchor.

Wagner is holding on by a thread if the ubiquitous V-I fifth "function" is his connection to CP tonality, because the functions in a chromatic formation, like a diminished chord, are now multiple, with 4 possible meanings. Function must operate with _actual sounds_, not as a proposition or a possibility.

If traditional voice leading is his connection, it facilitate these sorts of resolutions, so this is a superficial, stylistic element.

Wagner is part of the CP tonal tradition because of history, and his role, and what he accomplished within that context, but if you look at the mechanics of the music from a purely formal perspective, in musical and harmonic sound-terms only, he was doing nothing different than all the 'modernist' tonalists who came after him: creating music which was chromatic, and existing as a new form of chromatic tonality apart from the diatonic major/minor system. He tried to relate it tp CP tonality, but this was an effort which was contrary to the nature of chromaticism.

Being chromatic, Wagner's 'new reinvention of tonality' is fundamentally no different than Debussy's or Bartok's chromatic excursions; the styles are different, Wagner wants to be more connected to tradition, but the mechanics remain the same: localized tone centers created out of the chromatic backdrop by geometry, which are created by various divisions of 3 half-step cycles (diminished) or 4 half-step cycles (augmented/whole tone), which are, by their very nature, 'glitches' in the diatonic system, with built-in ambiguity. These are "harmonic mechanisms" which are derived geometrically from divisions of 12. They are not "harmonic mechanisms" which are derived from sound or consonance/dissonance.

Wagner had to _consciously_ relate his music to earlier common practice tonality, because now the _chromatic_ was the playing field. His music itself (at its most radical) could not do this; he had to use traditional forms and stylistic references in order for it to be supposed to relate to CP tonality.

The elements of the music we are concerned with here, the music itself at its most chromatic and most radical harmonically, was not CP tonal: that part was chromatically-derived. Chromaticism is chromaticism; it is not some form of 'extended' diatonic tonality. If it does relate to tonality, it does so just as Debussy's or Bartok's chromaticism did; anything can be made to resolve into the ubiquitous fifth of the home triad.

CP tonality was _not_ originally designed to be 3 or 4 different possible key areas at once, or as arbitrary resolutions into whatever 4 keys are closest-by, or 'expectation without resolution' by faith. Tonality is diatonic. This means one key, with modulations, and sound based on harmonic, not geometric, principles.

Resolution is harmonic, and is to be heard as consonance, not as an intellectual possibility. 
Wagner's music, and its supposed connection to CP tonality, becomes more tenuous as he becomes more chromatic and radical, until it finally becomes an intellectual exercise, divorced from sonic tonality and real sonic resolution. This was not an 'extension' of tonality, as a harmonic accomplishment, but was an idea.

Chromaticism is a geometry, using the number 12, which is arbitrary (the Pythagoran comma compromise), and has no basis in harmonically-based sound such as that which tonality is based on. 
Chromaticism is based on a "12-ness" which was not always present in Western music. It came _after_ the consonant triad of 1-4-7 (root, M3, 5th).

"12-ness" came from Pythagoran ideas. Pythagoranism was a cult which 'believed' in the significance of number. It was an intellectual pursuit.

Musically, "12-ness" or chromaticism is not related to the 7-note harmonic basis of tonality. "12-ness" is not harmonically derived. The division of the octave into 12 pitches is totally arbitrary, and has caused the entire development of Western music to fulfill this arbitrary path.

Tonality is sound, not idea. It seems that tonality, so ingrained into us, is so strong that it can become more than it really is. The "expected resolutions" are 'beliefs' which never materialize. We have 'faith' in tonality that allows us to think of Wagner in this way.


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## Woodduck

millionrainbows said:


> *Wagner is part of the CP tonal tradition because of history, and his role, and what he accomplished within that context, but if you look at the mechanics of the music from a purely formal perspective, in musical and harmonic sound-terms only,** he was doing nothing different than all the 'modernist' tonalists who came after him*: creating music which was chromatic, and existing as a new form of chromatic tonality apart from the diatonic major/minor system. He tried to relate it tp CP tonality, but this was an effort which was contrary to the nature of chromaticism.
> 
> *Wagner had to consciously relate his music to earlier common practice tonality,* because now the _chromatic_ was the playing field. His music itself (at its most radical) could not do this; *he had to use traditional forms and stylistic references in order for it to be supposed to relate to CP tonality. *
> 
> Wagner's music, and its supposed connection to CP tonality, becomes more tenuous as he becomes more chromatic and radical, until* it finally becomes an intellectual exercise, divorced from sonic tonality and real sonic resolution. This was not an 'extension' of tonality, as a harmonic accomplishment, but was an idea.*
> 
> *Tonality is sound, not idea.* *It seems that tonality, so ingrained into us, is so strong that it can become more than it really is. The "expected resolutions" are 'beliefs' which never materialize. We have 'faith' in tonality that allows us to think of Wagner in this way.*


The very last sentences in your post above - _"Tonality is sound, not idea. It seems that tonality, so ingrained into us, is so strong that it can become more than it really is. The "expected resolutions" are 'beliefs' which never materialize. We have 'faith' in tonality that allows us to think of Wagner in this way"_ - may be the key to the difference in the way we hear, or describe, the harmonic practice of Wagner.

I think that tonality is very much "idea," existing only as a pattern of expectation in the mind of the listener. You've written a lot about the physical (acoustic) existence of "tonality" as something objectively present as a property of sound itself irrespective of its employment in the temporal art of music. But I think that the physical properties you talk about (which I won't make a feeble attempt to describe here) are only raw sensory data out of which the mind constructs tonality, and that it's this creation of the mind - specifically, the particular pattern of expectations of which a particular tonal system consists - that we mean when we discuss tonality as an attribute of music. As we know, tonality takes many forms in different styles of music, of which our traditional Western common practice is only one. These tonal systems may have elements in common, and those elements may indeed derive (in part) from perceptions of the physical properties of tone. But those properties are not the substance of tonality; they are only one of the factors, physical and psychological, which prompts the human mind to organize pitches into hierarchical systems which, when it perceives them acting musically, it experiences as vehicles of meaning.

If tonality is fundamentally a mental construction which exists in the form of a pattern or system of expectations - expectations of what tones will do - the question to ask about Wagner is not whether his music embodies some particular "tonal sound," but whether, how, and to what extent it assumes, is directed at, and plays upon our tonal expectations. Does his harmony aim at exciting, and is it experienced as invoking and in some sense satisfying (remembering that music satisfies by frustrating as well as fulfilling), the set of expectations we have come to consider fundamental to our Western tonal system? I believe the answer to this is unequivocally _yes._ And I would venture the opinion that Wagner himself thought of his own practice in this way, even as he recognized, sometimes to his own surprise, how far he was carrying that system's capacity to accommodate extended progressions of ambivalent harmonies which suspend the listener's tonal orientation. Music has to _presume_ a tonal orientation in order to be perceived as _suspending_ it - and this perceived suspension, with the tension it creates, is precisely the source of the expressive power of Wagner's music. This is not different in principle from what happens in any tonal music, even in the simplest diatonic music in which the harmony departs from the tonic chord in order to create a tension which is subsequently resolved. But, as a piece like Schumann's C Major Fantasy shows, it isn't necessary for the tonic to be sounded in order for the mind's "tonality template" to be activated: we don't have to hear a keynote, a departure from it, or a return to it, in order to know that what we're experiencing is tonal music. Wagner simply pursues this principle to an unprecedented degree of chromatic complexity in pursuit of limitless expressivity. It's no accident that it was the story of Tristan and Isolde, which required him to express an unquenchable longing satisfied only by the finality of death, that prompted him to compose harmony in which tonal expectations were paradoxically satisfied by their very frustration on a grand scale. The "proto-atonality" of Wagner's most extreme practice (which, by the way, does not even occupy the largest percentage of his music) is a metaphor of dramatic suspense which can function as such only if it is heard in terms of the "stable state" or norm of tonal resolution. And that dynamic is something that only tonal music can achieve. The "declamatory" effect of the Tristan chord - it's surprise, mystery, and inexplicable poignance - is only possible because it isn't "normal" - because its ambiguity is heard in a tonal context and by ears which demand resolution. Three hours later, of course, they get it.

Unlike Schoenberg, Wagner was not inventing a new musical vocabulary for ears and minds that did not yet exist, and he justified his musical practices not intellectually, as the fulfillment of a theorist's or a "modernist's" historical-teleological fantasy, but as a felt imperative to express the dramatic ideas which possessed him. His musical art was intuitive, not cerebral, and the language he spoke intuitively and happily, and expanded to the limit of his imagination, was the harmonic tonal language he inherited and proceeded to enrich. Thus Wagner's practice was far from your characterization of it as self-consciously "using" traditional forms and stylistic "references" in order for it to be "supposed" to "relate to" CP tonality. I think that to hear Wagner with a "faith" in the Western tonal tradition is, far from signifying a habitual prejudice or a deluded projection of unfulfillable expectations, to hear him exactly as he is meant to be heard and as he would have expected to be heard.


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## fluteman

millionrainbows said:


> . The division of the octave into 12 pitches is totally arbitrary, and has caused the entire development of Western music to fulfill this arbitrary path.
> 
> Tonality is sound, not idea. It seems that tonality, so ingrained into us, is so strong that it can become more than it really is. The "expected resolutions" are 'beliefs' which never materialize. We have 'faith' in tonality that allows us to think of Wagner in this way.


Yes, we've discussed this before, and I've made precisely this point. Although the division of the octave into twelve pitches is largely arbitrary, as you say, it isn't entirely arbitrary, because it turns out that if you follow the circle of fifths to the twelfth degree, you end up dividing the octave into twelve (very) roughly equal intervals. But just as one strand of modern music seeks alternatives to the traditional diatonic scale, another abandons the convention of dividing the octave into 12 parts, now easily done with modern technology. Others de-emphasize or abandon entirely the traditional concept of tonal centers. Still others more or less maintain the harmonic traditions that have held sway in the west for centuries and are adventurous in other ways. Modernism encompasses all of that, and I think that's a good thing. I don't want my ears to become so "ingrained" with traditional tonality that I can't explore new sounds. They will sound strange at first, but that makes life more interesting.
One can still enjoy Richard Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg, of course. I suggest having a snack first.


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## Woodduck

fluteman said:


> Yes, we've discussed this before, and I've made precisely this point. Although the division of the octave into twelve pitches is largely arbitrary, as you say, it isn't entirely arbitrary, because it turns out that if you follow the circle of fifths to the twelfth degree, you end up dividing the octave into twelve (very) roughly equal intervals. But just as one strand of modern music seeks alternatives to the traditional diatonic scale, another abandons the convention of dividing the octave into 12 parts, now easily done with modern technology. Others de-emphasize or abandon entirely the traditional concept of tonal centers. Still others more or less maintain the harmonic traditions that have held sway in the west for centuries and are adventurous in other ways. Modernism encompasses all of that, and I think that's a good thing. I don't want my ears to become so "ingrained" with traditional tonality that I can't explore new sounds. They will sound strange at first, but that makes life more interesting.
> One can still enjoy Richard Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg, of course. I suggest having a snack first.


Isn't it interesting how we were prompted to different applications of the same post? I do agree with everything you say here about not being confined by old mental habits in listening to music. I especially agree about the snack.


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## millionrainbows

The tonal "flaw" in the major scale is that it does not reinforce its own tonal center of C, but of F.

As I showed before, C-D-E-F reinforces F, with the leading tone E-F. The second half, G-A-B-C _does_ reinforce C, with the leading tone up to C. The problem, then is the tritone B-F.

The "diminished" chord on vii is not really a chord with a root on B. As Walter Piston (his book _Harmony_) and Schoenberg have both pointed out, B-D-F is really an incomplete G7, and is resolved as if it were.

Also, the major scale lacks consonance, and can be demonstrated 2 ways:

On an organ, go up by fifths, starting on C: C-G-D-A-E-B-F. It sounds fine until you hit the F.

Also, by thirds: C-E-G-B-D-F. It sounds consonant and angelic until you hit F.

F# is a better note in both cases, and solves the problem.

But to stick to white notes, which is more convincing, simply start on F:

F-C-G-D-A-E-B. It now sounds fine.

Likewise, with thirds: F-A-C-E-G-B-D. It sounds very consonant.

So the white-note scale which best reinforces tonality has its tonic on F, not C.

F-G-A-B has the leading tone B which wants to resolve to C, the fifth step, or V; and C-D-E-F resolves as E-F to I, the home key.

So the major scale of Western tonality is inherently ambiguous, and contains the seed of its own demise, the tritone B-F and its position in the scale, and the fact that aurally, it does not reinforce the tonic C.

The tritone and its offspring, the diminished, also weakens tonality, and is also the product of chromaticism and 12-ness; and chromaticism is at odds with general tonality, which by nature must be limited to 6 notes or fewer to be utterly tonal.

So Western tonality is not the "ultimate" tonality by any means; it has 7 notes, which exceeds the tonal ideal of the 50% mark of six notes; it has a tritone; and its major scale is less-than optimally designed for reinforcing its own supposed tonality.

Perhaps in using the diminished so frequently as he did, Wagner was fulfilling this ambiguous destiny.


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## millionrainbows

To hear the Tristan chord as startling _only_ because it is not 'normal' does, indeed, reinforce the qualities of tonality and consonance as the norm.

This also suggests elimination of any other ways of hearing musical constructs which are dissonant, or which are outside the bounds of what is presumed to be the norm.

It eliminates the possibility of hearing Wagner as anything but tonal. This is fine, but we should also realize that the materials he was working with are the 'givens' of any music which uses the same chromatic pitches.

Like I have always said about tonality, it is the expression of Western culture, as it originated in the Church.

Tonality is God, and is the "1" at the top of the hierarchy, to which all other things are related. Even chromaticism and the Devil's own tritone are within his command and purview.

The net result seems to say that Wagner at least had a direct connection to God, if not replacing him.

Richard Strauss retreated, after Elektra, and took his chances with the powers that be, who turned out to be in league with "Satan";

Mahler was a "believer," who wanted a cosmopolitan Beethovenian unity of all men, whose reward was to be kicked out of his own Germany to seek refuge in America;

Shoenberg was a believer until he realized that "the law of God" was from a certain Christian "God" that he could not belong to, and was likewise shuttled off to UCLA where he relegated himself to playing ping-pong with George Gershwin;

This is stuff of history, before postmodernism woke us up from our slumber, when men like Wagner were touted as "geniuses" while trampling over women and the less powerful, creating war, and ultimately creating the means to his own destruction.

If Wagner's Western version of tonality is considered the apex of all possible tonal-centered music, as well as extending its grasp and claim to hold sway over the chromatic area, then Wagner has been transformed into an idol, and a dogma, as the law-giver whose judgements and actions are final.

Tonality is God, and Wagner has been elevated into its avatar.

It's no wonder that the post-WWII modernist generation, after the devastation of Europe, and with the hydrogen bomb looming ahead, decided that this paradigm had reached its logical conclusion.


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## fluteman

millionrainbows said:


> The tonal "flaw" in the major scale is that it does not reinforce its own tonal center of C, but of F.
> 
> As I showed before, C-D-E-F reinforces F, with the leading tone E-F. The second half, G-A-B-C _does_ reinforce C, with the leading tone up to C. The problem, then is the tritone B-F.
> 
> The "diminished" chord on vii is not really a chord with a root on B. As Walter Piston (his book _Harmony_) and Schoenberg have both pointed out, B-D-F is really an incomplete G7, and is resolved as if it were.
> 
> Also, the major scale lacks consonance, and can be demonstrated 2 ways:
> 
> On an organ, go up by fifths, starting on C: C-G-D-A-E-B-F. It sounds fine until you hit the F.
> 
> Also, by thirds: C-E-G-B-D-F. It sounds consonant and angelic until you hit F.
> 
> F# is a better note in both cases, and solves the problem.


Yes, and that's because the organ or piano is equal-tempered, and diverges from the true (Pythagorean) overtone series, right? Yet as I said earlier, we've become so accustomed to equal temperament anything else can sound strange.


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## fluteman

millionrainbows said:


> To hear the Tristan chord as startling _only_ because it is not 'normal' does, indeed, reinforce the qualities of tonality and consonance as the norm.


I'm sorry, but after this entirely reasonable first sentence, I think your post flies off the rails of reason. Perhaps you've assigned maintenance duties to Amtrak. 
I'm beginning to suspect the reason for all the fighting over Wagner here is that many of us assign him far more long-term cultural (and even religious and political!) significance to his music and life than they deserve. For me, the innovator who first began to swim the waters of tonal ambiguity in a significant way was not Wagner, but Chopin. And the most revolutionary 19th century western composer after Beethoven was not Wagner, but Berlioz. And if you must crown a composer the one and only founder of modernism, that certainly isn't Wagner either, nor is it Schoenberg, but rather Igor Stravinsky.
Where this supposedly central importance of Wagner comes from, I have no idea.


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## millionrainbows

fluteman said:


> Yes, and that's because the organ or piano is equal-tempered, and diverges from the true (Pythagorean) overtone series, right? Yet as I said earlier, we've become so accustomed to equal temperament anything else can sound strange.


Our ET fifth is only 2 cents off, so the ET scale favors fifths, and the fifth is what gives the most stability in tonality.

The major third is 14 cents sharp. That's why all the mean-tone tunings emerged, in the search for better thirds.

If we can glean anything from this, we will hear that a stack of fifths sounds more consonant without the tritone, if we go to a keyboard, not a computer keyboard.


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## millionrainbows

fluteman said:


> I'm sorry, but after this entirely reasonable first sentence, I think your post flies off the rails of reason. Perhaps you've assigned maintenance duties to Amtrak.
> I'm beginning to suspect the reason for all the fighting over Wagner here is that many of us assign him far more long-term cultural (and even religious and political!) significance to his music and life than they deserve. For me, the innovator who first began to swim the waters of tonal ambiguity in a significant way was not Wagner, but Chopin. And the most revolutionary 19th century western composer after Beethoven was not Wagner, but Berlioz. And if you must crown a composer the one and only founder of modernism, that certainly isn't Wagner either, nor is it Schoenberg, but rather Igor Stravinsky.
> Where this supposedly central importance of Wagner comes from, I have no idea.


Wagner seems to be the 'dividing line' between him & what came after. It clearly draws a line between tonality and that which is not, or has mutated horribly.


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## fluteman

millionrainbows said:


> Wagner seems to be the 'dividing line' between him & what came after. It clearly draws a line between tonality and that which is not, or has mutated horribly.


True, if you substitute Stravinsky for Wagner. For the most part Wagner is a conventional 19th century tonal composer, though a great one. His command of large-scale structure and thematic development is his great strength.


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## Woodduck

fluteman said:


> I'm sorry, but after this entirely reasonable first sentence, I think your post flies off the rails of reason. Perhaps you've assigned maintenance duties to Amtrak.
> I'm beginning to suspect the reason for all the fighting over Wagner here is that many of us assign him far more long-term cultural (and even religious and political!) significance to his music and life than they deserve. For me, the innovator who first began to swim the waters of tonal ambiguity in a significant way was not Wagner, but Chopin. And the most revolutionary 19th century western composer after Beethoven was not Wagner, but Berlioz. And if you must crown a composer the one and only founder of modernism, that certainly isn't Wagner either, nor is it Schoenberg, but rather Igor Stravinsky.
> Where this supposedly central importance of Wagner comes from, I have no idea.


I'm in qualified agreement with most of your observations here, but there are reasons why Wagner has the reputation he has, even if he does sometimes get credit for more than his own extraordinary achievements.

Wagner, Debussy remarked, was a glorious sunset mistaken for the dawn. That doesn't do him justice, of course (you don't have to be profound if you're French, you just have to be cleverly aphoristic). Wagner's cultural impact and influence were enormous beyond anything we can imagine - I've talked about it on other threads - but as a purely _musical_ stylist his "new thing" was largely an extension and grand synthesis of the innovations of others, and you are right to point to Berlioz and Chopin as key figures. The third key figure was Liszt, who, based on some of his harmonic experiments, has often been called more of a modernist than Wagner. Wagner's style underwent a marked enrichment at the point where he broke off work on the _Ring_ to compose _Tristan_, and he said at the time "Since I know Liszt and since he plays for me, I have become a much different harmonist than formerly." I think it extremely likely that some of what Liszt played for Wagner was the music of Chopin. As for Berlioz, Wagner acknowledged a profound debt to him, making him a gift of the score of _Tristan_ inscribed and dedicated "to the composer of _Romeo and Juliet_."

Like all the greatest musical minds, Wagner's was a sponge, soaking up everything interesting that he heard around him and finding in it unsuspected possibilities. The summation of Wagner's artistic method which is the score of _Parsifal,_ while it constitutes a unique sound-world expressing a realm of emotion hitherto scarcely explored by any composer, has been described as a recapitulation of the history of Western music; its heterogeneous style, ranging from purely diatonic chorales and counterpoint to a chromatic subtlety surpassing even that of _Tristan_ - all of it amazingly unified by Wagner's dramatic vision - points backward to Palestrina and forward to Berg, taking in Bach, Chopin and Liszt along the way. Wagner overwhelmed his contemporaries by synthesizing the innovations of Romantic music - its programmatic basis, its focus on expression, its chromatic harmony, its structural freedom, even its conscious archaisms - at an undreamed of level of intensity and on an epic scale. His work was, frankly, intimidating, and composers had to come to terms with it, even if by pointedly ignoring it or rejecting it - or trying to.

Aside from his simple overwhelming presence in the artistic life of his era, another reason why Wagner is assigned the status of a "turning point" in music is simply, I think, that he was the main musical stimulus to the next big thing in German (and Western) music, the movement into atonality by Schoenberg, Berg and Webern. The members of the Second Viennese School spent many an evening playing through the score of _Tristan_, trying to figure out how they could possibly go beyond it. It was Schoenberg's great idea - that chromaticism had brought tonality to its breaking point and that he was to be music's savior - that cast Wagner in the role of prophet and turned the "Tristan chord" into a musical icon.

ADDENDUM: I must add to the above the important point that in the field of opera Wagner was every bit the crucial figure that he's reputed to be. Opera, no matter by whom, could not sound the same after the "music drama," not even in Italy. Puccini kept scores of Wagner's operas on his piano and played them when he needed inspiration.


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## fluteman

Woodduck said:


> I'm in qualified agreement with most of your observations here, but there are reasons why Wagner has the reputation he has, even if he does sometimes get credit for more than his own extraordinary achievements.


This and the rest of your post are all well put and I agree entirely, without taking back anything I've said. I've already said Wagner was a great composer who as you say transformed the western opera, and though perhaps nobody cares about my opinions, I don't call composers "great" lightly.
What I don't understand are the lengthy acrimonious debates here that expand into large political and religious issues. Yes, Wagner was an anti-Semitic arrogant [email protected] Great composers often aren't great people. But he long predated Hitler and the Nazis, so no point in linking his music to them. And yes, Schoenberg was influenced by Wagner, as well as Brahms and Dvorak. But retroactively imbuing the "Tristan chord" with so much historical importance is somewhat inaccurate. And as I (and others) have already said, the father of modernism is Stravinsky, not Schoenberg. To his bitter disappointment, many prominent mid-20th century composers explicitly rejected Schoenberg's ideas, in some cases despite his personal entreaties to them. Of course, his influence has been more profound and permanent than he may have appreciated, but as he himself understood and greatly resented, not as profound and widespread as that of Stravinsky. 
Wagner has had a lasting influence entirely apart from anything the second Viennese school did. For example, one hears it in Hollywood movies even to this day. The napalm scene in Apocalypse Now, famously set to The Ride of the Valkyries, is a direct and explicit tribute to Wagner, but such movies had long used Wagnerian scores.


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## millionrainbows

It doesn't matter that Schoenberg was rejected by many mid-century composers, if what they were producing was simply a genetically-altered, mutated form of harmonic tonality. Even Wagner's chromaticism is more 'modern' that much of that. 
The way forward was chromaticism, and chromaticism is at odds with creating tonality. 
These various brands of tonality are just post-modern distractions derived from the afterglow of the greatness of the past era, when "history" and one's place in it still meant something.

My discussion of Wagner in musical terms is exhausted. Going forward any further will lead to trouble. His real significance is not in the exaggerated accusations of antisemitism, but are more general, tying in with the general thought-currents of the nineteenth century, Nietzsche, and the modern era. The Church had lost its power, and secular philosophical thinking took over. Influential? Inspiring? Yes, even to the evil. But Wagner was a product of his times.

This new iteration of the old paradigm, a dangerous inversion of the old order, elevated Man to the top of the hierarchy; there is now no higher power; the Age of God had passed, replaced by pseudo-religious mythology, psychology, social science, enlightenment, philosophy, and weapons of mass destruction.

Now it was the Age of the Gods, personifications of Man's hubris, leading to WWI and WWII, and finally the hydrogen bomb.


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## fluteman

millionrainbows said:


> Going forward any further will lead to trouble.


Well, at least I can agree with this statement. ;-)


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## Woodduck

fluteman said:


> What I don't understand are the lengthy acrimonious debates here that expand into large political and religious issues. Yes, Wagner was an anti-Semitic arrogant [email protected] Great composers often aren't great people. But he long predated Hitler and the Nazis, so no point in linking his music to them. And yes, Schoenberg was influenced by Wagner, as well as Brahms and Dvorak. But retroactively imbuing the "Tristan chord" with so much historical importance is somewhat inaccurate. And as I (and others) have already said, the father of modernism is Stravinsky, not Schoenberg. To his bitter disappointment, many prominent mid-20th century composers explicitly rejected Schoenberg's ideas, in some cases despite his personal entreaties to them. Of course, his influence has been more profound and permanent than he may have appreciated, but as he himself understood and greatly resented, not as profound and widespread as that of Stravinsky.


Right. The debates about Wagner typically lead away from music, and even away from opera, into ideological thickets. My part in these debates always consists of trying to set limits to this diversion, based on what we actually know about Wagner's work and thought. As the most philosophical of composers with the widest influence outside of music, he has quite properly been discussed in extramusical, as well as musical, terms since his own time. But the musical and the extramusical get tangled up indiscriminately in the dark shadows of subsequent history, and first thing we know, we're listening to "fascist" music accompanying allegories of racial supremacy, ominous agitprop for genocide and apocalypse disguised as fairy tales.

Maybe someday our culture will be able to see Wagner's work unfiltered by our own historical biases; in this respect I think the ordinary music lover is better positioned than the academics and critics for whom art and history are fodder for tendentious interpretations designed to secure publication and flatter the fashionable ideologies of whoever is currently doing the hiring and firing. I've always been grateful that I got to know Wagner's works before any of the garbage that's been piled on them had any meaning for me. I had no difficulty, once I learned about that stuff, in saying, "but that's not what I hear." It's sad that there are people who "know" about Wagner without ever having listened to an opera.


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## millionrainbows

The age of "geniuses" and "heroes" is over. If one subscribes to that paradigm and view of history, they are hypnotized by the past. "Bias" works both ways. Wagner worshippers are somnambulists.

Without resorting to exaggerated accusations of antisemitism, Wagner is simply the result of the general thought-currents of the nineteenth century, Nietzsche, and the modern era. The "Ubermensch."

John Cage is a much healthier, more sane alternative, and his music will do the world more good.


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## Woodduck

millionrainbows said:


> The age of "geniuses" and "heroes" is over. If one subscribes to that paradigm and view of history, they are hypnotized by the past. "Bias" works both ways. Wagner worshippers are somnambulists.
> 
> Without resorting to exaggerated accusations of antisemitism, Wagner is simply the result of the general thought-currents of the nineteenth century, Nietzsche, and the modern era. The "Ubermensch."
> 
> John Cage is a much healthier, more sane alternative, and *his music will do the world more good.*


Presumably by being ignored by almost everyone. And when we're really smart we'll all just "listen" to 4'33" and subscribe to its "paradigm," and then the age of music will be over.


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## fluteman

Woodduck said:


> Presumably by being ignored by almost everyone. And when we're really smart we'll all just "listen" to 4'33" and subscribe to its "paradigm," and then the age of music will be over.


Oh, don't rise to the bait, Woodduck, you're not a rainbow trout. It's bad enough he says, "the way forward was chromaticism", to which others here reply, essentially, "Schoenberg ruined music for 50 years and it must never happen again", as if those are the only two ways of thinking about 20th century music. Now it's back to ridiculing 4'33", or ridiculing those who can't wrap their minds around modern theater of the absurd or conceptual art, or saying it may be art but it isn't music, blah, blah, blah.
Cage would have been delighted with all the play 4'33" gets in internet discussion groups. He probably thought it was all over once the first audience walked out.


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## Woodduck

fluteman said:


> Oh, don't rise to the bait, Woodduck, you're not a rainbow trout. It's bad enough he says, "the way forward was chromaticism", to which others here reply, essentially, "Schoenberg ruined music for 50 years and it must never happen again", as if those are the only two ways of thinking about 20th century music. Now it's back to ridiculing 4'33", or ridiculing those who can't wrap their minds around modern theater of the absurd or conceptual art, or saying it may be art but it isn't music, blah, blah, blah.
> Cage would have been delighted with all the play 4'33" gets in internet discussion groups. He probably thought it was all over once the first audience walked out.


:lol: I'm visualizing myself as a fish.

Don't worry, I'm only playing. When I see an overinflated balloon threatening to burst under pressure of its own hot air, I want so badly to hear the pop that I can't resist pulling out a needle. No one at the party actually gets hurt.


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## SiegendesLicht

millionrainbows said:


> *The age of "geniuses" and "heroes" is over.* If one subscribes to that paradigm and view of history, they are hypnotized by the past. "Bias" works both ways. Wagner worshippers are somnambulists.


Yes, and the age of militant mediocrities who cannot compose even half-decent music has arrived....

And on topic: Woodduck, what do you think Alban Berg's most Wagnerian work is? Where should a Wagner admirer start to get to know his music?


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## Woodduck

SiegendesLicht said:


> Yes, and the age of militant mediocrities who cannot compose even half-decent music has arrived....
> 
> And on topic: Woodduck, what do you think Alban Berg's most Wagnerian work is? Where should a Wagner admirer start to get to know his music?


You might just begin with his lush piano sonata, of which there are many fine recordings. Also early works (and very tonal) are songs; there's a beautiful collection recorded by Jessye Norman. There's plenty of Wagner's influence in his operas; you hear it most specifically when his desire to touch the emotions is greatest, as in the orchestral interlude in the final act of _Wozzeck, _ which is really more Mahlerian than Wagnerian in sound. Berg's music often has a sort of world-weary, post-Romantic dreaminess that's closer to late Mahler than to Wagner.


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## fluteman

Woodduck said:


> You might just begin with his lush piano sonata, of which there are many fine recordings.


 I know of a pianist who would have agreed with you -- Glenn Gould. It was one of the first pieces he recorded. And I think a lot of Berg's orchestral music is closer to late Mahler than to Wagner. as you say. And I wasn't asked, but I'm a fan of the Lyric Suite and the violin concerto too.


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## SiegendesLicht

The violin concerto - do you mean the one that is titled "Dem Andenken eines Engels"? I have listened to it just now - not exactly the kind of musical fare I am used to, but very nice. More aesthetically satisfying in fact, than the woman it was dedicated to. Hoping to hear it live soon. But you are right, there is nothing particularly Wagnerian about it.


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## fluteman

SiegendesLicht said:


> The violin concerto - do you mean the one that is titled "Dem Andenken eines Engels"? I have listened to it just now - not exactly the kind of musical fare I am used to, but very nice. More aesthetically satisfying in fact, than the woman it was dedicated to. Hoping to hear it live soon. But you are right, there is nothing particularly Wagnerian about it.


Yes, that's the one, apparently dedicated to Alma Mahler's 18-year old daughter after her death from polio. Nathan Milstein recounted in his memoir that he was so taken by the piece he convinced Louis Krasner, who had commissioned it and apparently still owned performance rights, to allow Milstein to perform a version for violin and piano. I know of no recording of that version, though.


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## millionrainbows

The "rhetoric of genius" is rampant in such discussions, and blinds us to the fact that music is created just as other objects like refrigerators, telephones, and computers were created: the last guy gets all the credit, but these are ideas which resulted and culminated in a long period of development.

Technologies, audiences, and knowledge of technicalities of the craft are all factors in music. There will never be an answer to the OP's query in this kind of paradigm.

The paradigm of the solitary genius blinds us to the possibilities of music, and removes context, and divides participants into "believers" or "agnostics."


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## fluteman

millionrainbows said:


> the last guy gets all the credit, but these are ideas which resulted and culminated in a long period of development."


Yup, that's very true in many if not all realms of the intellect and ideas. Take mathematics. British mathematician Andrew Wiles gets credit for solving Fermat's last theorem in 1994, centuries after it was stated by French lawyer Pierre de Fermat (1607-1665) in notes discovered after Fermat's death by his son. And yet, Wiles' proof builds on the work of several mathematicians over those intervening centuries, including both predecessors who died before he was born and contemporaries whom he knew and worked with directly. Many of these mathematicians, including Wiles himself, at various times hid their work from others in order to prevent credit for their ideas being stolen away, and yet there is no avoiding that these ideas in general are the culmination of a group effort.
But all that doesn't mean Wiles isn't a genius.


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## Woodduck

millionrainbows said:


> The "rhetoric of genius" is rampant in such discussions, and blinds us to the fact that *music is created just as other objects like refrigerators, telephones, and computers were created: the last guy gets all the credit*, but these are ideas which resulted and culminated in a long period of development.
> 
> Technologies, audiences, and knowledge of technicalities of the craft are all factors in music. _*There will never be an answer to the OP's query in this kind of paradigm.*_
> 
> *The paradigm of the solitary genius blinds us to the possibilities of music, and removes context, and divides participants into "believers" or "agnostics."*


What's the relevance?

Music is not an objective object with a specific purpose like a refrigerator. There is no "last guy" in music, only significant, exceptional figures along the way.

The OP's query has generated some pretty good answers, outside of any "paradigm."

What does "belief" or "agnosticism" have to do with it?


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## fluteman

Woodduck said:


> What's the relevance?
> 
> Music is not an objective object with a specific purpose like a refrigerator. There is no "last guy" in music, only significant, exceptional figures along the way.
> 
> The OP's query has generated some pretty good answers, outside of any "paradigm."
> 
> What does "belief" or "agnosticism" have to do with it?


The OP talks about "Wagner's idiom" as if it is a unique music language with no precedents or successors and a life of its own continuing past Wagner's own life, which to me is not entirely true of Wagner or any artist, however influential. There really is no modern Wagner, or dissonant Wagner. To that extent, I agree with millionrainbows. 
Moreover, Wagner belongs to the pre-electricity, pre-recording industrial revolution era, a unique time with a unique set of circumstances in western music. People listen to music very differently in the post-industrial world, and five-hour operas are seldom the medium of choice. Perhaps my answer to the OP for a later version of Wagner's idiom would be Einstein on the Beach by Philip Glass.


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## Woodduck

fluteman said:


> *The OP talks about "Wagner's idiom" as if it is a unique music language with no precedents or successors and a life of its own continuing past Wagner's own life*, which to me is not entirely true of Wagner or any artist, however influential. There really is no modern Wagner, or dissonant Wagner. To that extent, I agree with millionrainbows.
> Moreover, Wagner belongs to the pre-electricity, pre-recording industrial revolution era, a unique time with a unique set of circumstances in western music. People listen to music very differently in the post-industrial world, and five-hour operas are seldom the medium of choice. Perhaps my answer to the OP for a later version of Wagner's idiom would be Einstein on the Beach by Philip Glass.


Where did you find that?

The OP asks: _"My question is: What other musical works can be said is a direct sequel, heir, follower to Tristan und Isolde's musical language from a purely music theoretical point of view. A piece of music where Wagner's idiom is even more atonal, but with Tristan's spirit, which is important?"_

Millionrainbows posits a paradigm of "the solitary genius" and attributes it to the OP and to the discussion in general, saying:_ "There will never be an answer to the OP's query in this kind of paradigm."_ No such paradigm is assumed by the OP; in fact, it assumes exactly the opposite - that Wagner is part of a continuity. Both his successors and his predecessors are easy to cite, as are his unique contributions. I thought we were all doing doing just that.

A continuity from Wagner to _Glass?_


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## fluteman

Woodduck said:


> Where did you find that?
> 
> The OP asks: _"My question is: What other musical works can be said is a direct sequel, heir, follower to Tristan und Isolde's musical language from a purely music theoretical point of view. A piece of music where Wagner's idiom is even more atonal, but with Tristan's spirit, which is important?"_
> 
> Millionrainbows posits a paradigm of "the solitary genius" and attributes it to the OP and to the discussion in general, saying:_ "There will never be an answer to the OP's query in this kind of paradigm."_ No such paradigm is assumed by the OP; in fact, it assumes exactly the opposite - that Wagner is part of a continuity. Both its successors and its predecessors are easy to cite, as are his unique contributions. I thought we were all doing doing just that.
> 
> A continuity from Wagner to _Glass?_


I found it in the first post of this thread, where the OP asks for "more atonal" examples of "Wagner's idiom", as if such a thing exists. What actually exists, as you say, is a continuity of later music, some of which is significantly influenced by Wagner, but also increasingly influenced by other things, including the contemporary era and cultural environment. And I suppose you're playing the provocateur again, but if you consider the idea of a lengthy opera with large-scale structures, repeated use of short themes or motifs, and extended periods of tonal ambiguity, the continuity from Wagner to Glass is pretty obvious. The more I think about it, the more I think Einstein on the Beach is a good answer to the OP's question.


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## Woodduck

fluteman said:


> *I found it* in the first post of this thread, where the OP asks for "more atonal" examples of "Wagner's idiom", as if such a thing exists. What actually exists, as you say, is a continuity of later music, some of which is significantly influenced by Wagner, but also increasingly influenced by other things, including the contemporary era and cultural environment. And *I suppose you're playing the provocateur again*, but if you consider the idea of a lengthy opera with large-scale structures, repeated use of short themes or motifs, and extended periods of tonal ambiguity, the continuity from Wagner to Glass is pretty obvious. The more I think about it, the more I think Einstein on the Beach is a good answer to the OP's question.


You didn't find it. You imagined it. It isn't there.

"Playing the provocateur"? "Again"? Oh please. The only thing I care to "provoke" is rationality when I see horsepuckey.

How about asking millionrainbows about the provocativeness of talking about "believers" and "agnostics" and arguing against positions and "paradigms" that no one here is even advancing?

It's perfectly obvious what the OP means by "more atonal" examples of "Wagner's idiom." We might agree that the terminology is imprecise, but that is no reason for turning the perception it embodies on its head and claiming that the writer believes the opposite of what he does believe.

OK, so Glass wrote a long opera with repeated short motifs and "ambiguous tonality," whatever that means. If you think those are essential to Wagner's idiom, and that they make Glass "Wagnerian" and _Einstein_ a successor to _Tristan_ in any meaningful sense, I'm not going to try to prove otherwise. With the discussion at this stage of deterioration, it wouldn't be worth the effort.


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## fluteman

Woodduck said:


> You didn't find it. You imagined it. It isn't there.
> 
> "Playing the provocateur"? "Again"? Oh please. The only thing I care to "provoke" is rationality when I see horsepuckey.
> 
> How about asking millionrainbows about the provocativeness of talking about "believers" and "agnostics" and arguing against positions and "paradigms" that no one here is even advancing?
> 
> It's perfectly obvious what the OP means by "more atonal" examples of "Wagner's idiom." We might agree that the terminology is imprecise, but that is no reason for turning the perception it embodies on its head and claiming that the writer believes the opposite of what he does believe.
> 
> OK, so Glass wrote a long opera with repeated short motifs and "ambiguous tonality," whatever that means. If you think those are essential to Wagner's idiom, and that they make Glass "Wagnerian" and _Einstein_ a successor to _Tristan_ in any meaningful sense, I'm not going to try to prove otherwise. With the discussion at this stage of deterioration, it wouldn't be worth the effort.


Oh, don't get sore. I've enjoyed your posts in this thread. And if I had to pick the Wagner of the second half of the 20th century, it probably would be Francis Ford Coppola (who, as I mentioned before, tips his hat to Wagner in one of his most famous scenes), not Philip Glass. But I concede trying to pick the modern-day Wagner is a bit of a fool's errand, so no point in getting any madder at me for _this_ post.

Edit: And yes, millionrainbow's comments about "believers" and "agnostics" is off the rails for me. As I said above, perhaps he's subcontracting maintenance to Amtrak.


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## millionrainbows

The myth of genius and all that goes along with it is definitely a matter of believing in a paradigm, or not. 

If one does believe, then it ends there, with whomever accomplished "the apex" of the ideas in question. A clear line where "tonality had extended itself fully" and essentially reached its conclusion has already been drawn in this thread, implying that the tonal tradition could develop no further, unless it carried its full CP baggage with it, as Wagner did. 

In this purview, chromaticism is a form of extended tonality, and has no connection to Wagner if it does not present the same references to traditional tonal practices. 

I see this as an academic view which counts CP tonality, and its major/minor system as the only form of tonality capable of consideration, and brands other forms of tonality as something different, incapable of providing strong enough links back to tradition.

This may be true, or not. It depends on how you choose to see it.


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## fluteman

millionrainbows said:


> The myth of genius and all that goes along with it is definitely a matter of believing in a paradigm, or not.
> 
> If one does believe, then it ends there, with whomever accomplished "the apex" of the ideas in question. A clear line where "tonality had extended itself fully" and essentially reached its conclusion has already been drawn in this thread, implying that the tonal tradition could develop no further, unless it carried its full CP baggage with it, as Wagner did.
> 
> In this purview, chromaticism is a form of extended tonality, and has no connection to Wagner if it does not present the same references to traditional tonal practices.
> 
> I see this as an academic view which counts CP tonality, and its major/minor system as the only form of tonality capable of consideration, and brands other forms of tonality as something different, incapable of providing strong enough links back to tradition.
> 
> This may be true, or not. It depends on how you choose to see it.


I confess I do not understand a single sentence of this post. All cultural traditions can, and almost inevitably do, develop, at least in a dynamic, prosperous society. Our world changes and expands over time, and artists adapt to and react to the world of their time. I suppose one could define "tonality" in a way that means its development must come to a final, logical conclusion. But tonality in that sense is not a central, crucial concept for music, at least for me. Mankind had music long before tonality, so narrowly defined, came along, and will have music long after it has, if not disappeared entirely, at least greatly receded.


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## millionrainbows

The effort to connect the most chromatic characteristics of Wagner's music back to the old, real, functional, visceral tonality puts chromaticism in the smaller context of tradition, and ignores its momentum towards modern musical thinking. Wagner's chromaticism was just like any other form.


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## millionrainbows

fluteman said:


> ...I suppose one could define "tonality" in a way that means its development must come to a final, logical conclusion. But tonality in that sense is not a central, crucial concept for music...


There are academics who think that tonality reached its apotheosis in Wagner. Their idea of tonality is a strict CP major/minor form.

The common-practice system is not the only tonality. It is a specialized form of many possibilities.

Tonality is not a definition; it is what happens when a tonal hierarchy is created, which causes us to hear and refer the sound to a tonic note.

The more notes that are added, the less tonal it is. When "12" is reached, the situation is tenuous, especially when this begins to creep into root movement.

Chromaticism is not "extended tonality;" it is chromaticism.

One must escape the academic notions, and look at the evidence.


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## Woodduck

A clear line where "tonality had extended itself fully" and essentially reached its conclusion has already been drawn in this thread, implying that the tonal tradition could develop no further, unless it carried its full CP baggage with it, as Wagner did.

In this purview, chromaticism is a form of extended tonality, and has no connection to Wagner if it does not present the same references to traditional tonal practices.

The effort to connect the most chromatic characteristics of Wagner's music back to the old, real, functional, visceral tonality puts chromaticism in the smaller context of tradition, and ignores its momentum towards modern musical thinking.

There are academics who think that tonality reached its apotheosis in Wagner. Their idea of tonality is a strict CP major/minor form.

Chromaticism is not "extended tonality;" it is chromaticism.

You're arguing with a straw man - several of them, actually.

No one has argued for any of the things you're arguing against. No one has said or implied that "chromaticism _is_ [emphasis mine] extended tonality" - merely that tonal thinking can encompass chromaticism, and that most of Wagner's harmonic thinking arose, and should be heard, in that frame of reference.

No "clear line where tonality had extended itself fully" has been posited in this thread, and no one has implied that "the tonal tradition could develop no further," unless you did and I missed it somehow.

No one has made an "effort to connect _the most_ [emphasis mine] chromatic characteristics of Wagner's music back to the old, real, functional, visceral tonality" (adjectives which could use some explaining, but let that go...). And merely to point out that most of Wagner's harmony is rooted in, or understandable with reference to, tonal tradition is not to ignore what is new in it, or deny its relationship to the harmonic thinking of later composers.

Maybe it's your putative "academics" you're squabbling with, the ones who think that tonality is nothing but major and minor. Who the heck are those blighters, anyway?


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## millionrainbows

Tonality is not a way of thinking; it is an hierarchy which creates reference to a key note.

Likewise, chromaticism is not tonality, because it uses all 12 notes, and divides the octave differently, not using the fourth or fifth to derive its structures.

Tonality had extended itself fully in the late works of Wagner, and no further development was possible.

To declare that Wagner "extended tonality" is only plausible if one makes a conscious effort to do so, in connecting it back to tonality as an intellectual academic reference, not a real, visceral form of tonality.


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## millionrainbows

In this link, Bernstein discusses how Mozart uses diatonic tonality and chromaticism:






Notice how he _distinguishes_ the two methods, seeing them as separate methods, yet working together in the service of making diatonic tonality more interesting and alive.

This is the perfect example of the "dual nature" of tonality: its diatonic origins and the use of chromaticism, in the form of diminished seventh chords. Chromaticism serves tonality, yet it creates _movement away from tonic and creates vagueness. It is a destabilizing influence._

Just because Mozart, and Wagner, used diminished chords in this tonal way does not mean that the chromatic materials are "tonal" intrinsically. It all depends on how they are used, and in what context.

This does not mean that chromaticism, and diminished sevenths are, or have been, an "intrinsic" part of diatonic tonality, or that we should see these mechanisms (the results of interval projection and geometric divisions of the 12-collection) as being "born" of tonality. These mechanisms are always "abstract" in the sense that they are geometric in nature (not harmonic or sensual, but cerebral and mathematic).

Therefore, the chromatic elements in Mozart should be viewed no differently than Wagner's use of it; they are both "moderns" in this regard. They serve tonality, but both are serving modernism and abstraction as well.

Therefore the very same elements which make tonality "interesting," "profound," "extended," or "great" are those exact same elements which make the composers profound musical thinkers, who, intentionally or not, were paving the way for 12-tone, serial, and other forms of "abstract" or geometrically-based (cerebral/mathematical) music of the future, which is in direct opposition to diatonic tonality, which by its very nature is sensual, limited, and boring!

Thank goodness that "great" composers like Bach and Mozart were progressive and "modern" musical thinkers, who were paving the way for the fruition and ultimate evolution of music away from diatonic (boring) tonality and towards an ultimately abstract and geometric music, based on symmetries and more cerebral principles.


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## millionrainbows

So this is why I question the concept of "extended tonality" in Wagner, if Mozart and Bach were doing the same thing earlier. Like all profound musical thinkers, they realized that diatonic tonality is boring. 

In fact, we are behooved to define "Common Practice" tonality in these dual terms: diatonic tonality coupled with chromaticism and the "chromatic/fifths" methods used by the great composers.

This makes Western Common Practice Tonality, at its best, a special kind of tonality which constantly moves and modulates and redefines the tonic. Thus viewed, Western tonality always contained the seeds of its own "expansion" into total chromaticism and the mechanisms of chromaticism.

Just because Wagner used these geometric resources at the service of his ostensible "tonality" does not change their essential forward-looking nature, which is chromatic and based on geometry and symmetry, and is "at odds" with simple diatonic tonality.

To deny the evolution of music into these geometric areas, which were always present and available, and claim that these concepts and "automatic" mechanisms (diminished, whole tone) are an intrinsic feature, or the exclusive domain of tonality, is short-sighted and myopic.

Chromaticism enriched tonality at the same time that it "expanded" it into unrecognizability.


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## Woodduck

Oh God. It's back.

Don't you ever tire of arguing with straw men? (Rhetorical question.)

The last word is, of course, yours. Along with the one after that, and the one after that, and...


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## millionrainbows

Woodduck said:


> Oh God. It's back.
> 
> Don't you ever tire of arguing with straw men? (Rhetorical question.)
> 
> The last word is, of course, yours. Along with the one after that, and the one after that, and...


This has nothing to do with the discussion. At least I don't post ad hominems and make personal attacks. I stick to the issues, and discuss.


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## Woodduck

millionrainbows said:


> This has nothing to do with the discussion. At least I don't post ad hominems and make personal attacks. I stick to the issues, and discuss.


What discussion? It's been exhausted, you've misrepresented my views repeatedly (as I explained in my last post, with no acknowledgement from you), and all you're doing now is beating the dead horse to a pulp in order to have the last word here, even when its perfectly obvious that no one is listening. Well, have it. But ad hominems? Don't make me quote your constant remarks on other people's inability to appreciate music properly, their lack of "spirituality" or whatever the hell you like to say they lack, etc. etc. etc. Not a few such remarks have been directed at me: personal attacks of a kind I couldn't even imagine making. Issues schmissues.


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## Larkenfield

"He means "atonal" strictly in the sense of "not Common Practice Tonal," which includes most tonally-centered music of the world, including ethnic, world, folk, and pop."

Okay, but when there's a specific 20th century musical development that's referred to as "Atonality" by Schoenberg and others, how could such a definition possibly lead to anything but confusion? The use of the word atonal in that sense seems like having your cake and wanting to eat it too. IMO, a better use of that word is to use it only with regard to specific composers, and I doubt if that includes pop and everything else heeped in with the general use of that word. 

I can't recall hearing anything in world music, ethnic music, folk music or pop music related to what I would refer to as atonality in the Schoenbergian sense, unless it's buried in some nook and cranny somewhere. I would say that much of that music is built upon certain scales and indigenous cultural patterns of influences, shifting keys and tonal centers, sometimes very complex rhythmically and harmonically, understandable to the culture or the genre of the music, rather than the atonality of a Schoenberg and his colleagues. Such a broad use of the word seems more like a way of trying to promote and rationalize the music rather than truly explaining what it is and how it differs significantly from other music. It's stretching the word beyond all limits until it practically has no meaning at all. And some listeners are already confused enough by the use of the words Serialism, 12-tonality, and Atonality. Let's give 'em a break and consistently align those words with specific composers rather than generalities, whether technically correct or not. 

What experienced listeners, perhaps even novices, would be unable to tell the dramatic difference between Wagner's extreme chromaticism and quickly shifting tonal centers, and the atonality of the 2nd Viennese School? I believe that's the distinction some listeners are looking for without blurring the line between the two.


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## Woodduck

Larkenfield said:


> "He means "atonal" strictly in the sense of "not Common Practice Tonal," which includes most tonally-centered music of the world, including ethnic, world, folk, and pop."
> 
> Okay, but when there's a specific 20th century musical development that's referred to as "Atonality" by Schoenberg and others, how could such a definition possibly lead to anything but confusion? The use of the word atonal in that sense seems like having your cake and wanting to eat it too. IMO, a better use of that word is to use it only with regard to specific composers, and I doubt if that includes pop and everything else heeped in with the general use of that word.
> 
> *I can't recall hearing anything in world music, ethnic music, folk music or pop music related to what I would refer to as atonality in the Schoenbergian sense,* unless it's buried in some nook and cranny somewhere. I would say that much of that music is built upon certain scales and indigenous cultural patterns of influences, shifting keys and tonal centers, sometimes very complex rhythmically and harmonically, understandable to the culture or the genre of the music, rather than the atonality of a Schoenberg and his colleagues. Such a broad use of the word seems more like a way of trying to promote and rationalize the music rather than truly explaining what it is and how it differs significantly from other music. It's stretching the word beyond all limits until it practically has no meaning at all. And some listeners are already confused enough by the use of the words Serialism, 12-tonality, and Atonality. *Let's give 'em a break and consistently align those words with specific composers rather than generalities, whether technically correct or not. *
> 
> *What experienced listeners, perhaps even novices, would be unable to tell the dramatic difference between Wagner's extreme chromaticism and quickly shifting tonal centers, and the atonality of the 2nd Viennese School? I believe that's the distinction some listeners are looking for without blurring the line between the two.*


I concur that the usual, and most sensible, use of the term "atonal" is with reference to the harmonic style of the Second Viennese School and its progeny and close relatives. That sort of harmony uses the same notes (the 12 half-steps) as the chromatic scale of Western tonal tradition, but with a deliberate avoidance of tonal hierarchy. Thus "atonality" is meaningful specifically with reference to the tonality which precedes it historically. Other music lacking in tone-centricity and pitch hierarchy would better be called "non-tonal," but aside from unpitched percussion such music is rare in the world and, as you point out, it wouldn't sound anything like atonality in Western music. Offhand I can't even think of an example; tone-centricity and hierarchy among the notes of a scale are virtually universal in the indigenous musics of the world. Humans clearly have an innate propensity to order pitched musical sounds on these principles.

The difference between tonal and atonal music in the Western classical tradition is clearly perceptible, and that goes emphatically for the music of Wagner, as you point out. Even as a raw beginner, a twelve or thirteen-year-old discovering Wagner and first hearing (and performing, as a chorus member in "A Survivor from Warsaw") Schoenberg's atonal music a few years later, I could hear the tonality in _Tristan_'s and _Parsifal_'s chromaticism and its absence in Schoenberg's work. The line is clear to the discerning ear, and the difference can't be defined as a mere difference in the degree of chromaticism.


----------



## millionrainbows

Woodduck said:


> What discussion? It's been exhausted, you've misrepresented my views repeatedly (as I explained in my last post, with no acknowledgement from you), and all you're doing now is beating the dead horse to a pulp in order to have the last word here, even when its perfectly obvious that no one is listening. Well, have it. But ad hominems? Don't make me quote your constant remarks on other people's inability to appreciate music properly, their lack of "spirituality" or whatever the hell you like to say they lack, etc. etc. etc. Not a few such remarks have been directed at me: personal attacks of a kind I couldn't even imagine making. Issues schmissues.


It sounds to me as if you are criticizing my posting style. Isn't that something you should deal with, rather than complain about?

Anyway, the discussion is far from exhausted, since the Leonard Bernstein video was posted. This gave me a new insight into chromaticism and tonality, and I'm eager to continue.


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## millionrainbows

Larkenfield said:


> "He means "atonal" strictly in the sense of "not Common Practice Tonal," which includes most tonally-centered music of the world, including ethnic, world, folk, and pop."


Well, really, that same academic I was complaining about also defined 'tonality' that way in all our past discussions: common practice Western tonality only, with no generalized meaning (as in tone-centric folk and world musics). That was sarcasm on my part, applying it to the term 'atonality.' Sorry if that did not translate well. It was really bothersome in those discussions to have to define "tonality" as meaning _general tonality_ every time I used the term.



Larkenfield said:


> Okay, but when there's a specific 20th century musical development that's referred to as "Atonality" by Schoenberg and others, how could such a definition possibly lead to anything but confusion? The use of the word atonal in that sense seems like having your cake and wanting to eat it too. IMO, a better use of that word is to use it only with regard to specific composers, and I doubt if that includes pop and everything else heeped in with the general use of that word.


I finally resolved the dilemma in this way: "atonality" is not a specific term, and never was, even when it was used to label the pre-12-tone period of Schoenberg, before he adopted the method proper.

It is a general term, meaning 'music that is not tonal.' It does not, and should not have to define the different ways that music can be not-tonal; it is exclusionary, general, and used for convenience.



Larkenfield said:


> I can't recall hearing anything in world music, ethnic music, folk music or pop music related to what I would refer to as atonality in the Schoenbergian sense, unless it's buried in some nook and cranny somewhere. I would say that much of that music is built upon certain scales and indigenous cultural patterns of influences, shifting keys and tonal centers, sometimes very complex rhythmically and harmonically, understandable to the culture or the genre of the music, rather than the atonality of a Schoenberg and his colleagues. Such a broad use of the word seems more like a way of trying to promote and rationalize the music rather than truly explaining what it is and how it differs significantly from other music. It's stretching the word beyond all limits until it practically has no meaning at all. And some listeners are already confused enough by the use of the words Serialism, 12-tonality, and Atonality. *Let's give 'em a break and consistently align those words with specific composers rather than generalities, whether technically correct or not.*


I hesitate to do that, since the term "atonal" is general, and is not meant to specify or explain, but merely to exclude music which is not based on a tonal hierarchy. It's a convenient term. The difference is usually self-evident anyway, except when some genius wants to bring Debussy or some other composer from the vague area between tonality and atonality in as an exception.



Larkenfield said:


> What experienced listeners, perhaps even novices, would be unable to tell the dramatic difference between Wagner's extreme chromaticism and quickly shifting tonal centers, and the atonality of the 2nd Viennese School? I believe that's the distinction some listeners are looking for without blurring the line between the two.


I agree, from a listening standpoint, but chromaticism and the 12-note scale is an underlying issue of craft and structure which is common to both camps, even if not obviously audible. It's an "issue" of underlying principles and ways of thinking, used as far back as Bach and Mozart. It all stems from the 12-note collection, which gradually emerged.


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## millionrainbows

Woodduck said:


> I concur that the usual, and most sensible, use of the term "atonal" is with reference to the harmonic style of the Second Viennese School and its progeny and close relatives. That sort of harmony uses the same notes (the 12 half-steps) as the chromatic scale of Western tonal tradition, but with a deliberate avoidance of tonal hierarchy. Thus "atonality" is meaningful specifically with reference to the tonality which precedes it historically.


I mostly agree, with reservations, that the most common and convenient use of the term 'atonal' is in reference to "the harmonic style of the Second Viennese School and its progeny and close relatives." But not exclusive to that era, since serial thought continued and developed well after WWII. Textbooks by Rahn and Forte still use the terms 'atonal' to identify music created with set theory, etc.



Woodduck said:


> Other music lacking in tone-centricity and pitch hierarchy would better be called "non-tonal," but aside from unpitched percussion such music is rare in the world and, as you point out, it wouldn't sound anything like atonality in Western music.


I agree, with the added specification that music, even advanced modern Western music, in which tonality (or the lack of it) is not a primary consideration, or part of the concern of the music, should not be called 'atonal,' since the term loses relevance when applied to music in which 'tonality' or even pitch is not a consideration.



Woodduck said:


> Offhand I can't even think of an example; tone-centricity and hierarchy among the notes of a scale are virtually universal in the indigenous musics of the world. Humans clearly have an innate propensity to order pitched musical sounds on these principles.


I agree; but somebody will find an exception and use it against us if we do not apply the term "atonal" in a logical, consistent way. Music such as John Cage's prepared piano works and tape collages are not concerned with the tonal/atonal dialectic; Ferneyhough's scratchy violin music is not either, except in the most oblique way.



Woodduck said:


> The difference between tonal and atonal music in the Western classical tradition is clearly perceptible, and that goes emphatically for the music of Wagner, as you point out.


It's a matter of degree, not a strict dividing line. And the degree of chromaticism is what determines tonality's complexity, movement, and restlessness.

The whole point of Wagner is that the tonality is _not_ as obvious as a diatonic form of tonality, and is much more vague and unsettled. This is due to the degree of chromaticism.

In case you are addressing my line of thought, I never claimed that Wagner was "not tonal" because he was chromatic. I simply pointed out that _chromaticism is an independent factor and way of thinking_, and that it is used to serve different ends. It is not 'intrinsically' tonal, or meant to serve tonality.

The 'sense of tonality' we get from Wagner, or even R. Strauss' Metamorphosen, is not due _only_ to references to a pitch center, but rather to a _combination of other stylistic and syntactical elements, including counterpoint and melody._

Tonality by this stage was much more complex, and pitch centers were playing less and less a role in its identity. It was becoming a revolving, chromatic thing, and this has more to due with the "cycling" nature of chromatic intervals (m3, M3, m2, M2, tritones) than it does with definite tone center references.

In that sense, Wagner's tonality is as 'ideological' to the same degree that it is chromatic.



Woodduck said:


> Even as a raw beginner, a twelve or thirteen-year-old discovering Wagner and first hearing (and performing, as a chorus member in "A Survivor from Warsaw") Schoenberg's atonal music a few years later, I could hear the tonality in _Tristan_'s and _Parsifal_'s chromaticism and its absence in Schoenberg's work.


Even as a twelve or thirteen-year-old raw beginner, you had no doubt already been imprinted with the inevitable obviousness of tonality in much simpler diatonic music; this basic, general sense of tonality is what allowed you to assimilate and interpret the chromaticism of Wagner as "tonal" in such a seemingly obvious way.

But in reality, this Wagner was already a complex tonality, which was referencing and building on the earlier basic building-blocks of tonality. This recognition of Wagner as tonal was no longer a simple, sensual perception, but was due just as much to assumptions which were learned and "believed" because there was no evidence to the contrary. In other words, an "ideology" of perception.



Woodduck said:


> The line is clear to the discerning ear, and the difference can't be defined as a mere difference in the degree of chromaticism.


The line is clear to the indoctrinated ear, with no other frame of reference. The stylistic nuances are there, the "gestures" are there, the rhythmic syntax and long melodies, but none of this is attributable to a simple pitch reference any more. And this is the essence of tonality: pitch reference.

This complex Western tonality of Wagner's _has always had a dual nature_ which made it increasingly complex and tonally vague, yet still capable, via the remaining elements of the syntax, to create the effects which tonality has always delivered.


----------



## Woodduck

millionrainbows said:


> I finally resolved the dilemma in this way: "atonality" is not a specific term, and never was, even when it was used to label the pre-12-tone period of Schoenberg, before he adopted the method proper.
> 
> It is a general term, meaning 'music that is not tonal.' It does not, and should not have to define the different ways that music can be not-tonal; it is exclusionary, general, and used for convenience.
> 
> ...the term "atonal" is general, and is not meant to specify or explain, but merely to exclude music which is not based on a tonal hierarchy. It's a convenient term. The difference is usually self-evident anyway, except when some genius wants to bring Debussy or some other composer from the vague area between tonality and atonality in as an exception.


I don't think there's really a "dilemma" here, but rather a matter of coming to terms with customary usage. If our purpose is etymological precision, "atonal" could refer to any music without tonal organization, including percussion music, musique concrete, the balinese monkey chant, some Japanese noh music, even some bits of Liszt's piano music. But no musician or musical scholar actually uses the term so broadly. "Atonal" is widely and customarily - and even popularly, among those with some breadth of musical experience - applied almost exclusively to music utilizing the 12 tones of the chromatic scale in a way that resembles in texture traditional tonal harmony but avoids suggesting tonal centers, resulting in more or less continuous dissonance. That sort of harmony is characteristic of the 20th-century Western music of Schoenberg and his followers and derivatives; it's "atonal" because of its specific contrast to the tonal music it follows historically.

Once we've got our etymologies down, we're left with the normal use of words, like it or not. Being etymologically inclined, I don't necessarily like it, but I accept it, and when I speak with friends about atonal music we know what we're referring to and what we aren't.


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## Woodduck

Millionrainbows: The whole point of Wagner is that the tonality is _not_ as obvious as a diatonic form of tonality, and is much more vague and unsettled. This is due to the degree of chromaticism.

Well, I wouldn't say that that's the _whole_ point, but yes, sort of.

I never claimed that Wagner was "not tonal" because he was chromatic. I simply pointed out that _chromaticism is an independent factor and way of thinking_, and that it is used to serve different ends. It is not 'intrinsically' tonal, or meant to serve tonality.

Wagner's chromaticism is not a decorative applique, a scream in the night, or a mere diversion between tonal moments. It is full of tonal suggestiveness, and is quite normally going somewhere, even if it keeps us in suspense about the goal, or predicts no single goal. There are isolated exceptions, moments of unprepared and unresolved harmonies used for specific dramatic purposes, but Wagner doesn't forget where he's going harmonically: his harmonic plans "work," even if we're unconscious of the means by which coherence is achieved. He's a great composer who venerated Beethoven, after all, not a scene painter in sound (although he's damn good at that too).

The 'sense of tonality' we get from Wagner, or even R. Strauss' Metamorphosen, is not due _only_ to references to a pitch center, but rather to a _combination of other stylistic and syntactical elements, including counterpoint and melody._

Wagner's harmony is full of references to pitch centers. Those centers are often unstated and change frequently, but it's precisely their presence, and Wagner's infinite resource in dealing with them on whatever time scale he chooses, that characterizes his harmonic genius.

Tonality by this stage was much more complex, and pitch centers were playing less and less a role in its identity. It was becoming a revolving, chromatic thing, and this has more to due with the "cycling" nature of chromatic intervals (m3, M3, m2, M2, tritones) than it does with definite tone center references.

Pitch centers are not less important in Wagner than they are in Haydn. They are less persistently and obviously stated, or often merely implied, and they may not remain stable over long periods, with the necessary result that his music is differently structured on micro and macro levels.

In that sense, Wagner's tonality is as *'ideological'* to the same degree that it is chromatic.

This is a strange verbal conceit which I see no point in, and on any interpretation I can imagine, it just seems off base. Tonality is fundamental to Wagner's musical thinking and an organic aspect of his music. It isn't an "idea," either of the composer or of the listener.

Even as a twelve or thirteen-year-old raw beginner, you had no doubt already been imprinted with the inevitable obviousness of tonality in much simpler diatonic music; this basic, general sense of tonality is what allowed you to assimilate and interpret the chromaticism of Wagner as "tonal" in such a seemingly obvious way.

This distorts the simple truth that as a kid I (like lots of kids) had learned to hear tonally and could therefore recognize tonality in Wagner's music. No "quotes" around "tonal"; nothing "seemingly" obvious. Wagner is tonal. I could hear it. And when I heard Schoenberg, I could hear that he isn't.

But in reality, this Wagner was already a complex tonality, which was referencing and building on the earlier basic building-blocks of tonality. This recognition of Wagner as tonal was *no longer a simple, sensual perception,* but was due just as much to *assumptions* which were *learned and "believed" because there was no evidence to the contrary.* In other words, an* "ideology" of perception.*

There is no "simple, sensual perception" of any kind of tonality. Tonal systems are not given in nature. At most, we hear fundamentals and partials which might suggest harmonic relationships. That doesn't even give us "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" or a Native American war chant, much less Wagner. The inclination to tonal organization may be natural, but particular tonal "assumptions" are learned. People learn them quickly; I learned Mozart's and Tchaikovsky's, and after an initial sensation of dizziness when confronted with the "Liebestod's" dissolving tonal centers, I learned Wagner's. No such thing as an "ideology" of perception has ever entered into it.

The line is clear to the indoctrinated ear, with no other frame of reference. The stylistic nuances are there, the "gestures" are there, the rhythmic syntax and long melodies, but *none of this is attributable to a simple pitch reference any more. And this is the essence of tonality: pitch reference.*

Which is it: pitch references, or simple pitch references? Tonal references don't have to be simple in order for tonality to be its "essential" self.

This complex Western tonality of Wagner's _has always had a dual nature_ which made it increasingly complex and tonally vague, yet still capable, via the remaining elements of the syntax, to create the effects which tonality has always delivered.

I agree that "the remaining elements of the syntax" (melodic and rhythmic structures) enable Wagner to support and contain his complex chromaticism. But less chromatic music also relies on these elements to make sense of its harmony. I disagree with the implication that Wagner's harmony lacks significant embedded tonal structures, and his music is in fact replete with carefully placed, often emphatic diatonic cadences. He was a canny musical dramatist - a teller of stories through music - who had to know where the plot was going, and dramatic progression is expressed through harmonic progression continuously and in innumerable subtle and specific ways.


----------



## JosefinaHW

:Bettina: 'Just out of curiousity: Did you discover Eric Chafe by reading his book _The Tristan Chord_ or his books on Bach?


----------



## Bettina

JosefinaHW said:


> :Bettina: 'Just out of curiousity: Did you discover Eric Chafe by reading his book _The Tristan Chord_ or his books on Bach?


I discovered him through his Bach books, a few years before he wrote his book on Wagner. In fact, I was surprised when I first found out about his Wagner book, because it seemed to be far outside his research area. However, as soon as I actually started reading the book, I realized that it was actually quite consistent with his other work, in terms of his approach and method (examining the allegorical relationships between music and text).


----------



## millionrainbows

Woodduck said:


> I don't think there's really a "dilemma" here, but rather a matter of coming to terms with customary usage. If our purpose is etymological precision, "atonal" could refer to any music without tonal organization, including percussion music, musique concrete, the balinese monkey chant, some Japanese noh music, even some bits of Liszt's piano music. But no musician or musical scholar actually uses the term so broadly. "Atonal" is widely and customarily - and even popularly, among those with some breadth of musical experience - applied almost exclusively to music utilizing the 12 tones of the chromatic scale in a way that resembles in texture traditional tonal harmony but avoids suggesting tonal centers, resulting in more or less continuous dissonance. That sort of harmony is characteristic of the 20th-century Western music of Schoenberg and his followers and derivatives; it's "atonal" because of its specific contrast to the tonal music it follows historically.
> 
> Once we've got our etymologies down, we're left with the normal use of words, like it or not. Being etymologically inclined, I don't necessarily like it, but I accept it, and when I speak with friends about atonal music we know what we're referring to and what we aren't.


I can live with that.


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## millionrainbows

Woodduck said:


> Wagner's chromaticism is not a decorative applique, a scream in the night, or a mere diversion between tonal moments. It is full of tonal suggestiveness, and is quite normally going somewhere, even if it keeps us in suspense about the goal, or predicts no single goal. There are isolated exceptions, moments of unprepared and unresolved harmonies used for specific dramatic purposes, but Wagner doesn't forget where he's going harmonically: his harmonic plans "work," even if we're unconscious of the means by which coherence is achieved. He's a great composer who venerated Beethoven, after all, not a scene painter in sound (although he's damn good at that too).


Still, Wagner's tonality is plenty chromatic, and its goal-oriented nature simply reinforces the fact that he is a tonal composer; _but that is merely the period at the end of a long paragraph._ The _profundity_ of Wagner is not merely due to the fact that he resolves, but all the chromatic acrobatics he used to get there.

The 'sense of tonality' we get from Wagner, or even R. Strauss' Metamorphosen, is not due _only_ to references to a pitch center, but rather to a _combination of other stylistic and syntactical elements, including counterpoint and melody._



Woodduck said:


> Wagner's harmony is full of references to pitch centers. Those centers are often unstated and change frequently, but it's precisely their presence, and Wagner's infinite resource in dealing with them on whatever time scale he chooses, that characterizes his harmonic genius.


I disagree. Any aborigine with a didgeridoo can establish a tone-center. It's the chromatic factors, which you describe as "his infinite resource in dealing with them on whatever time scale he chooses" that make his music interesting and advanced.



Woodduck said:


> Pitch centers are not less important in Wagner than they are in Haydn. They are less persistently and obviously stated, or often merely implied, and they may not remain stable over long periods, with the necessary result that his music is differently structured on micro and macro levels.


But if you keep stressing pitch centers, you are missing the point.

Wagner's tonality is as *'ideological'* to the same degree that it is chromatic.



Woodduck said:


> ...Tonality is fundamental to Wagner's musical thinking and an organic aspect of his music. It isn't an "idea," either of the composer or of the listener.


Ideologies are often hidden and unconscious. Wagner most certainly represented to many of his time the embodiment of "genius," and was a representative of all the values of his society. In this way, he represents an ideology.

Even as a twelve or thirteen-year-old raw beginner, you had no doubt already been imprinted with the inevitable obviousness of tonality in much simpler diatonic music; this basic, general sense of tonality is what allowed you to assimilate and interpret the chromaticism of Wagner as "tonal" in such a seemingly obvious way.



Woodduck said:


> This distorts the simple truth that as a kid I (like lots of kids) had learned to hear tonally and could therefore recognize tonality in Wagner's music. No "quotes" around "tonal"; nothing "seemingly" obvious. Wagner is tonal. I could hear it. And when I heard Schoenberg, I could hear that he isn't.


You didn't have to "learn" to hear tonally, nor did you have to "learn" to reproduce. You are bypassing the fact that Western tonality, especially Wagner's, owes most of its interest to chromatic resources. The "tonal" part is easy, and is just part of the package.


----------



## millionrainbows

The 'sense of tonality' we get from Wagner, or even R. Strauss' Metamorphosen, is not due _only_ to references to a pitch center, but rather to a _combination of other stylistic and syntactical elements, including counterpoint and melody. _Tonality by this stage was much more complex, and pitch centers were playing less and less a role in its identity. It was becoming a revolving, chromatic thing, and this has more to due with the "cycling" nature of chromatic intervals (m3, M3, m2, M2, tritones) than it does with definite tone center references.

Even as a twelve or thirteen-year-old raw beginner, you had no doubt already been imprinted with the inevitable obviousness of tonality in much simpler diatonic music; this basic, general sense of tonality is what allowed you to assimilate and interpret the chromaticism of Wagner as "tonal" in such a seemingly obvious way.

But in reality, this Wagner was already a complex tonality, which was referencing and building on the earlier basic building-blocks of tonality. This recognition of Wagner as tonal was no longer a simple, sensual perception, but was due just as much to assumptions which were learned and "believed" because there was no evidence to the contrary. In other words, an "ideology" of perception.

In that sense, Wagner's tonality is as 'ideological' to the same degree that it is chromatic.



Woodduck said:


> This is a strange verbal conceit which I see no point in, and on any interpretation I can imagine, it just seems off base. Tonality is fundamental to Wagner's musical thinking and an organic aspect of his music. It isn't an "idea," either of the composer or of the listener.


Then here is your "point," or explanation.
I use the term "tonality" in a general sense; otherwise, for the purposes of my clarification, I term Wagner, et al, as "Western tonality" or "the major/minor system of tonality."

This is because of _harmonic function,_ which distinguishes Western tonality from other simplistic forms of tonality, such as folk and world musics.

In the diatonic major/minor system of tonality, triads have a prescribed function. The triads are I-ii-iii-IV-V-vi-vii. That means that a major triad occurs three times in this schema, as I, IV, or V. Whenever these triads occur, no matter how far the music has modulated, they must be considered as I, IV, or V of some key area. For example, if a D major triad occurs on the second degree in the key of C, it is usually considered to be the "V" of a different key, namely G. This allows for modulation to a new key area. You already know this.

This re-interpretation of a major triad, because of its position in the key of C, is a tonal mechanism. It has nothing to do with "pitch centricity," and everything to do with "function."

These tonal mechanisms are arbitrarily imposed (on chromatic steps which make no sense otherwise except diatonically), in order to "make sense" of the new _diatonic_ key station. This is due to functions which are already assumed, and in place. This "robs" chromatic steps of their free interpretation as chromatic. They must be "converted" into a diatonic context. This is rather simplistic and restrictive from a chromatic standpoint.

The point is that these tonal mechanisms of function and resolution are arbitrary concepts; "tonal ideas" which represent a "tonal ideology" which is just as arbitrary, imposed, and "invented" as anything serialism can be accused of.

Diatonic tonality, and the key system, is due in large part to the keyboard, with its white-note diatonic scale and the accompanying minor scale. Also, tertial triads (built on thirds) are the norm, since they fit easily under the fingers of pianists. Triads are also arbitrary in this sense; mechanisms which have no essential connection to key centers, but should rightly be considered objectively, as Debussy did, as simply "harmonic entities."

Debussy would use major chords in parallel, without function, so his D major triad (in C) would be justified by the ear, not by an arbitrary system of functions. In this way, he "emancipated" chordal use.

Wagner's use of diminished seventh chords are also dependent on arbitrary resolutions; usually, they would resolve to a dominant seventh chord as the "V" of a new key area.

So these tonal mechanisms, resolutions and functions, are all "fabricated" to serve the ends of an _ostensibly_ diatonic key area.

This complex Western tonality of Wagner's _has always had a dual nature_ which made it increasingly complex and tonally vague, yet still capable, via the remaining (arbitrary) elements of the syntax, to create the effects which tonality has always delivered.




Woodduck said:


> I agree that "the remaining elements of the syntax" (melodic and rhythmic structures) enable Wagner to support and contain his complex chromaticism. But less chromatic music also relies on these elements to make sense of its harmony.



Less chromatic music of Western tonality also uses these mechanisms, but they are no less arbitrary. The only "true" tonality is one which is centered on a central pitch; all else becomes a complex system of modulation resolution, and function, which are imposed after the fact of tone centricity. These mechanisms are chromatic in nature whenever the music strays from this first, primal, basic center.




Woodduck said:


> I disagree with the implication that Wagner's harmony lacks significant embedded tonal structures, and his music is in fact replete with carefully placed, often emphatic diatonic cadences.



But that's the point you seem to be missing: the "cadences" you speak of, and take for granted as part of a "natural" tonality of pitch center, are not natural at all, but are cerebral "devices" and mechanisms, bolstered by centuries of assumptions and acceptance of these as "natural." These devices represent a "resistance" to chromaticism as it should be seen objectively. And eventually, Debussy and other composers grew weary of these restrictions.

In closing, Western tonality is not more "natural" than serialism or other harmonic or non-harmonic organizational systems or methods. It is just as "ideological" as any other complex system which uses chromatic resources.

Western tonality, and the major/minor system, is not a "natural" tonal system, but has survived only through chromatic resources. Otherwise, diatonic tonality is a dead-end.


----------



## Woodduck

Millionrainbows: The _profundity_ of Wagner is not merely due to the fact that he resolves, but all the chromatic acrobatics he used to get there. Any aborigine with a didgeridoo can establish a tone-center. It's the chromatic factors, which you describe as "his infinite resource in dealing with them on whatever time scale he chooses" that make his music interesting and advanced.

I haven't said that Wagner's profundity is "due to the fact that he resolves." That's just absurd. What I've said and will say right now is that Wagner's harmony is extraordinary because he is able to push ambiguity so far while maintaining - and intensifying - the tension which is an essential function of tonality, and doing it both small- and large-scale. As I've stated before, ambiguity is a concept which is only meaning within the context of definiteness. Wagner's harmony is constantly referencing and playing with that context - and it's doing so organically, not "ideologically." His chromaticism predominantly _exploits_ the possibilities of tonal thinking; it doesn't _negate_ them.

Any mediocrity can indulge in "chromatic acrobatics," and if you think that that describes what Wagner is up to, then you're either unable to perceive what he's doing or you're too caught up in your ideology of chromaticism's breakdown of tonality to acknowledge what's coming to your ears.

The 'sense of tonality' we get from Wagner, or even R. Strauss' Metamorphosen, is not due _only_ to references to a pitch center, but rather to a _combination of other stylistic and syntactical elements, including counterpoint and melody._ But if you keep stressing pitch centers, you are missing the point.

I'm missing nothing, and I'm not "stressing" pitch centers. I'm pointing out that Wagner's chromaticism assumes and refers to them.

Wagner's tonality is as *'ideological'* to the same degree that it is chromatic. Ideologies are often hidden and unconscious. Wagner most certainly represented to many of his time the embodiment of "genius," and was a representative of all the values of his society. In this way, he represents an ideology.

This is downright funny, using "ideological" to refer to totally different things and presenting the mash as an argument. You've stated that Wagner's _tonality_ is ideological. What he represents in society is beside the point.

So: can tonality be ideological? I can imagine that tonal effects framed in a context of atonal music, or some other tonal system, would represent an "idea." But I can assure you that Wagner felt the full force of the Western tonal tradition behind every note that arose from his imagination. He described composing as a kind of "dream state." Not much time for "ideologies" in dreams as intense as his.

Even as a twelve or thirteen-year-old raw beginner, you had no doubt already been imprinted with the inevitable obviousness of tonality in much simpler diatonic music; this basic, general sense of tonality is what allowed you to assimilate and interpret the chromaticism of Wagner as "tonal" in such a seemingly obvious way.

There is no "interpreting" and no "seeming." I knew Wagner was tonal from the get-go, even if I didn't know the term for it. I also knew, a few years later when I heard Schoenberg's "Survivor from Warsaw," that it was not tonal.


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## Woodduck

Millionrainbows: Wagner was already a complex tonality, which was referencing and building on the earlier basic building-blocks of tonality. 

Yes...

This recognition of Wagner as tonal was *no longer a simple, sensual perception*, but was due just as much to assumptions which were* learned* and "believed" because there was no *evidence* to the contrary. In other words, *an "ideology" of perception.* In that sense, Wagner's tonality is as *'ideological'* to the same degree that it is chromatic.

I dealt with this "ideological" business in my last post. Here I will say that tonality is never a "simple, sensual perception." All tonal systems are learned. Innate perceptual mechanisms may direct that learning in general ways, but don't determine the specific form a tonal system will take. Beyond the elementary perception of a "fundamental" and a couple of overtones in pitched sounds, nothing pertaining to tonality, Wagnerian or pre-Wagnerian, is given as "simple" data to the senses.

"Evidence" is a concept that applies to the sciences, but not to aesthetic phenomena. One has a perception of tonality or one doesn't. One doesn't "consult the evidence" to prove that one has heard what one has heard.

The point is that these tonal mechanisms of function and resolution are arbitrary concepts; "tonal ideas" which represent *a "tonal ideology" which is just as arbitrary, imposed, and "invented" as anything serialism can be accused of.*

Tonal "functions" must be "invented," yes, but tonality (tone-centricity and hierarchy) is a natural way of organizing musical sounds which has evolved over and over again in the music of the world, and very probably goes back to near music's beginnings. It is an "invention" without an inventor. Wagner's complex tonality, whose separate elements have much precedent, is thus a natural offspring of a long lineage, guided by the ear and not by a "concept" or "ideology."

Serial organization - must it be said again? - is not like that. It's an artifice, a device - with an _actual_ inventor, without whose peculiar set of dilemmas it would never have existed - for imposing coherence on music from which the natural ordering principles of tonality (and the "second-nature" functions of common practice) have been banned.

Wagner's use of diminished seventh chords are...dependent on *arbitrary resolutions*; usually, they would resolve to a dominant seventh chord as the "V" of a new key area. So these *tonal mechanisms, resolutions and functions, are all "fabricated"* to serve the ends of an _ostensibly_ diatonic key area. 

Resolving a diminished 7th to a dominant 7th is not inherently "arbitrary." Regardless of how many ways there are of resolving a chord, any particular resolution's justification depends on its context, and in context may be the most natural thing imaginable. Wagner is virtuosic in utilizing a large array of natural- and inevitable-sounding ways of resolving his chords in context. Your idea of tonal mechanisms "fabricated" to serve the ends of an _ostensibly_ diatonic key area" is weird, and your technical "explanations" (which I'm not quoting but can be viewed above) don't make it less so.

The only *"true" tonality is* one which is *centered on a central pitch*; *all else* becomes a complex system of modulation resolution, and function, which are *imposed after the fact of tone centricity.* These mechanisms are chromatic in nature *whenever the music strays from this first, primal, basic center.*

This is very problematic. What does "centered on a central pitch" mean? How near to center is "centered"? "All else" besides what? "Imposed after the fact of tone centricity"? What's the "fact"? And what's "imposed" after it? "Whenever the music strays from this first, primal, basic center"? Yikes!

Let's be clear about something: the "primal, basic center" is a single tone! _Everything else_ "strays" from it!

By the incredibly restrictive idea of tonality you seem to be describing here, anything that happens in music beyond a drone is not "really" tonal but merely "ideologically" so. Ommmmmm.

But that's the point you seem to be missing: *the "cadences" you speak of,* and take for granted as part of a "natural" tonality of pitch center, *are not natural at all, but are cerebral "devices" *and mechanisms, bolstered by centuries of assumptions and acceptance of these as "natural." *These devices represent a "resistance" to chromaticism* *as it should be seen objectively.* 

This is ridiculous. I pointed out Wagner's frequent diatonic cadences only as the most obvious earmarks of his fundamental tonality. His music contains a full continuum of harmonic effects from the most diatonic to the most chromatically complex and ambiguous. His more diatonic passages are not "resisting chromaticism," and they aren't flags raised to signal an acknowledgement of an otherwise alien or obsolete tonality. They are not statements about tonality; they are merely one extreme of a rich and expressive tonal language. _That_ is how they should be seen - i.e. heard - _objectively._

*In closing, Western tonality is not more "natural" than serialism or other harmonic or non-harmonic organizational systems or methods. It is just as "ideological" as any other complex system which uses chromatic resources.*


In closing: Nope.


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## millionrainbows

The _profundity_ of Wagner is not merely due to the fact that he resolves, but all the chromatic acrobatics he used to get there. Any aborigine with a didgeridoo can establish a tone-center. It's the chromatic factors, which you describe as "his infinite resource in dealing with them on whatever time scale he chooses" that make his music interesting and advanced.



Woodduck said:


> ...Wagner's harmony is extraordinary because he is able to push ambiguity so far while maintaining - and intensifying - the tension which is an essential function of tonality, and doing it both small- and large-scale. As I've stated before, ambiguity is a concept which is only meaning within the context of definiteness. Wagner's harmony is constantly referencing and playing with that context…


That's exactly what I just said.



Woodduck said:


> ...and it's doing so organically, not "ideologically." His chromaticism predominantly _exploits_ the possibilities of tonal thinking; it doesn't _negate_ them.


I disagree; the only truly "organic" and "natural" tonalities are _generalized harmonic models,_ in the form of scales. Western tonality is a much more "unnatural" and arbitrary form of tonality, with specific sets of functions, resolutions, and cadences, which merely reflect, but do not actually embody, the simple harmonic model from which it was derived. If you want "organic and natural" tonality, listen to Rameau's _Pieces de Clavecin_ - primarily diatonic, with dissonances treated in predictable ways, in which modulations are limited, gradual, and brief.

The 'sense of tonality' we get from Wagner, or even R. Strauss' Metamorphosen, is not due _only_ to references to a pitch center, but rather to a _combination of other stylistic and syntactical elements, including counterpoint and melody._ But if you keep stressing pitch centers, you are missing the point.

Wagner's tonality is as 'ideological' to the same degree that it is chromatic. Ideologies are often hidden and unconscious. Wagner most certainly represented to many of his time the embodiment of "genius," and was a representative of all the values of his society. In this way, he represents an ideology.



Woodduck said:


> You've stated that Wagner's _tonality_ is ideological...I can assure you that Wagner felt the full force of the Western tonal tradition behind every note that arose from his imagination.


Yes, and this is precisely why he, and others, view his music as the apotheosis of Western tonality; but it is only through an ideological interpretation of chromaticism that this was possible.

The mechanisms of resolution, cadence, and the explosion of diatonic function is in itself a "mechanistic ideology" which uses the 'ideology of tonal interpretation' to achieve its meaning.


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## millionrainbows

Wagner was already a complex tonality, which was referencing and building on the earlier basic building-blocks of tonality.

This recognition of Wagner as tonal was no longer a simple, sensual perception, but was due just as much to assumptions which were learned and "believed" because there was no evidence to the contrary. In other words, an "ideology" of perception. In that sense, Wagner's tonality is as 'ideological' to the same degree that it is chromatic.



Woodduck said:


> ...tonality is never a "simple, sensual perception." All tonal systems are learned. Innate perceptual mechanisms may direct that learning in general ways, but don't determine the specific form a tonal system will take.


I maintain that general tonalities, as occurring in folk and world musics, are derived from simple harmonic models, involving scales or the partials of a fundamental tone, which model the way we hear. This is innate, and common to all people.



Woodduck said:


> Beyond the elementary perception of a "fundamental" and a couple of overtones in pitched sounds, nothing pertaining to (Western) tonality, Wagnerian or pre-Wagnerian, is given as "simple" data to the senses.


I agree with this. Western tonality is a complex system with specific mechanisms of resolution and function.



Woodduck said:


> "Evidence" is a concept that applies to the sciences, but not to aesthetic phenomena. One has a perception of tonality or one doesn't. One doesn't "consult the evidence" to prove that one has heard what one has heard.


The mechanisms of Western tonality are so ingrained and assimilated that "tonality" is a learned concept (an ideology), not a perception. The perception of tonality is now only _referenced_ to natural harmonic models and phenomena, but which have already exceeded the bounds of what can rightly be called "natural." To Rameau, Wagner would be "noise," until he had assimilated the ideology.

The point is that these tonal mechanisms of function and resolution are arbitrary concepts; "tonal ideas" which represent a "tonal ideology" which is just as arbitrary, imposed, and "invented" as anything serialism can be accused of.



Woodduck said:


> Tonal "functions" must be "invented," yes, but tonality (tone-centricity and hierarchy) is a natural way of organizing musical sounds which has evolved over and over again in the music of the world, and very probably goes back to near music's beginnings. It is an "invention" without an inventor.


Yes, because it is based on harmonic models. These are scales, and when triads are built, we get "function." But this is the simple diatonic model; when chromaticism enters, the arbitrary mechanisms of resolution and chromatic root movement emerge, and the model is no longer simple, but becomes increasingly complex.



Woodduck said:


> Wagner's complex tonality, whose separate elements have much precedent, is thus a natural offspring of a long lineage, guided by the ear and not by a "concept" or "ideology."


Lineage? That's like saying a chihuahua and a Great Dane are the same. Wagner's tonality is an extremely complex, developed form of specialized Western tonality. This is essentially an artificial construct; I call it an aesthetic ideology, in revenge for serialism being labelled as such.



Woodduck said:


> Serial organization…is...an artifice, a device, with an _actual_ inventor, without whose peculiar set of dilemmas it would never have existed…


The "free atonal" music which was emerging proves otherwise. 12-tone simply codified what was already there. R. Strauss in Elektra, and Metamorphosen, some late sonatas of Scriabin, Berg's op. 1 Sonata, Schoenberg's Op. 11...



Woodduck said:


> Serial organization…is...an artifice, a device,...for imposing coherence on music from which the natural ordering principles of tonality (and the "second-nature" functions of common practice) have been banned.


No, not banned, but subsumed into an increasingly influential sea of chromaticism. Tonality was not "banned," but simply discarded.

Wagner's use of diminished seventh chords are...dependent on arbitrary resolutions; usually, they would resolve to a dominant seventh chord as the "V" of a new key area. So these tonal mechanisms, resolutions and functions, are all "fabricated" to serve the ends of an ostensibly diatonic key area.



Woodduck said:


> Resolving a diminished 7th to a dominant 7th is not inherently "arbitrary."


Yes it is, to serve a tonal purpose.



Woodduck said:


> Regardless of how many ways there are of resolving a chord, any particular resolution's justification depends on its context, and in context may be the most natural thing imaginable.


Of course, in the context of Wagnerian tonality.



Woodduck said:


> Wagner is virtuosic in utilizing a large array of natural- and inevitable-sounding ways of resolving his chords in context.


This doesn't change the fact that these "large arrays of natural and inevitable-sounding ways of resolving his chords in context" are arbitrary, and imposed by him to serve his tonal goals. Intrinsically, chromatic materials are not "inherently tonal."

The only "true" tonality is one which is centered on a central pitch; all else becomes a complex system of modulation resolution, and function, which are imposed after the fact of tone centricity. These mechanisms are chromatic in nature whenever the music strays from this first, primal, basic center.



Woodduck said:


> By the incredibly restrictive idea of tonality you seem to be describing here, anything that happens in music beyond a drone is not "really" tonal but merely "ideologically" so.


Yes, any large departures from a simple scale and its harmonic functions adds complexity to the basic idea of a tonality.

...the "cadences" you speak of, and take for granted as part of a "natural" tonality of pitch center, are not natural at all, but are cerebral "devices" and mechanisms, bolstered by centuries of assumptions and acceptance of these as "natural." These devices represent a "resistance" to chromaticism as it can be seen objectively. 



Woodduck said:


> I pointed out Wagner's frequent diatonic cadences...as the most obvious earmarks of his fundamental tonality. His music contains a full continuum of harmonic effects from the most diatonic to the most chromatically complex and ambiguous. His more diatonic passages are...merely one extreme of a rich and expressive tonal language.


Yes, this sounds like a description of Wagner as a Western tonalist.

In closing, Western tonality is not more "natural" than serialism or other harmonic or non-harmonic organizational systems or methods. It is just as "ideological" as any other complex system which uses chromatic resources.


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## Woodduck

Millionrainbows: Western tonality is not more "natural" than serialism or other harmonic or non-harmonic organizational systems or methods. It is just as "ideological" as any other complex system which uses chromatic resources. 

No matter how insistently you try to make it happen, the distinction between tonality and atonality will not disappear, and atonal serialism, as a technique for organizing musical tones, will never be anything but a contrivance fundamentally unlike tonality in its origin, application, and effect. The human ear - strictly speaking, the human mind - knows this in the act of perceiving their differing musical manifestations, and perception is where the rubber meets the road.

It's striking that you insist over and over about _how_ the ear hears as a basis for the development of tonality in the music of mankind, yet are so ready to disregard _what_ the ear hears in music ordered on the divergent principles of tonality and serialism.

But before I go any further, I have to say that I've come to believe that your pursuit of your argument is not entirely honest, and seems motivated not by a quest for understanding but by a desire to steamroll all opposition. Why do I believe this? Let's look at what you offer as a quotation from my postings. I wrote:

_"Beyond the elementary perception of a "fundamental" and a couple of overtones in pitched sounds, nothing pertaining to tonality, Wagnerian or pre-Wagnerian, is given as "simple" data to the senses."
_
You "quoted" me as follows: "Beyond the elementary perception of a "fundamental" and a couple of overtones in pitched sounds, nothing pertaining to *(Western) *tonality, Wagnerian or pre-Wagnerian, is given as "simple" data to the senses."[Emphasis added]

Question: Where did the word "Western" come from? Answer: You inserted it. This is not an error of omission. This is a deliberate attempt to change my meaning. And let's look at another example. You wrote:

*The profundity of Wagner is not merely due to the fact that he resolves, but all the chromatic acrobatics he used to get there.* Any aborigine with a didgeridoo can establish a tone-center. It's the chromatic factors, which you describe as "his infinite resource in dealing with them on whatever time scale he chooses" that make his music interesting and advanced. [Emphasis added]

I took issue with this, responding: _*"I haven't said that Wagner's profundity is "due to the fact that he resolves." That's just absurd.* What I've said and will say right now is that Wagner's harmony is extraordinary because he is able to push ambiguity so far *while maintaining - and intensifying - the tension which is an essential function of tonality,* and doing it both small- and large-scale. As I've stated before, *ambiguity is a concept which is only meaningful within the context of definiteness. Wagner's harmony is constantly referencing and playing with that context* - and it's doing so organically, not "ideologically." His chromaticism predominantly exploits the possibilities of tonal thinking; it doesn't negate them. *Any mediocrity can indulge in "chromatic acrobatics," *and if you think that that describes what Wagner is up to, then you're either unable to perceive what he's doing or you're too caught up in your ideology of chromaticism's breakdown of tonality to acknowledge what's coming to your ears." _ [Emphasis added]

In responding to this, you redact it to: "...Wagner's harmony is extraordinary because he is able to push ambiguity so far while maintaining - and intensifying - the tension which is an essential function of tonality, and doing it both small- and large-scale. As I've stated before, ambiguity is a concept which is only meaningful within the context of definiteness. Wagner's harmony is constantly referencing and playing with that context…". You then claim: "That's exactly what I just said."

Leaving out parts of my statement - which, as I wrote it, clearly refutes your notion that Wagner's "chromatic acrobatics" are the essential virtue of his harmony - apparently makes you think you can claim that my statement has the same meaning as yours. It doesn't; it's a rejection and a correction of yours, and your omissions tell me that you know that. This is fraudulent and shameful. And these are not the only examples of deviousness I could cite.

But beyond dishonesty (if there _is_ anything beyond it), your latest responses to my statements are riddled with absurdities. Try these:

the only truly "organic" and "natural" tonalities are generalized harmonic models, in the form of scales.

The mechanisms of resolution, cadence, and the explosion of diatonic function is in itself a "mechanistic ideology" which uses the 'ideology of tonal interpretation' to achieve its meaning. 

Do you really expect people to take the time to explain the fallacies, rhetorical posturings, and verbal sleights of hand in statements like these? And try this:

Tonality was not "banned," but simply discarded.

Gee whiz...How come I never noticed this important distinction while listening to Webern?

Your whole outlandish notion of the "ideology" of Western tonal harmony may be fairly well encapsulated here:

*The mechanisms of Western tonality are so ingrained and assimilated that "tonality" is a learned concept (an ideology), not a perception.* The perception of tonality is now only referenced to natural harmonic models and phenomena, but which have already exceeded the bounds of what can rightly be called "natural." To Rameau, Wagner would be "noise," until he had assimilated the ideology.

The point is that *these tonal mechanisms of function and resolution are arbitrary concepts; "tonal ideas" which represent a "tonal ideology" which is just as arbitrary, imposed, and "invented" as anything serialism can be accused of.*[Emphasis added]

The fallacy in your thinking lies in the false dichotomy you create between "natural" tonality, which for you can give rise to nothing but diatonic scales, and "tonal ideologies" which you think have to be acquired to recognize as tonal any pitch relationships that go beyond those scales. You fall into this fallacy because of your desire to root "natural" tonality in the elementary, sensual perception of the fundamental and overtones heard in pitched sounds. Apparently you think that tonal relations (melodic or harmonic) which utilize tones that partake of audible overtones are "naturally" expected by the human ear and thus give rise to tonality spontaneously, while the perception of any other pitches and pitch relationships as tonal must be learned and is therefore "ideological" and artificial in the same sense that the serial method of composition is artificial.

I consider this theory of "natural" vs. "ideological" tonality, and the distinction it asserts, to be invalid. I believe that no particular tonal system, regardless of its simplicity or complexity, is more or less "natural" than another. What _is_ natural is the propensity of the human mind to organize music on the principles of tone-centricity and hierarchy, a propensity which is merely a specific application of general perceptual processes. The actual pitch content of the scale is irrelevant, and _all tonal systems are learned._ More than that, they are _easily_ learned - without an "ideology" in sight - as evidenced by the ability of most people to hear tonality at work in music alien to their own cultures, and to acquire very easily the intuitive expectations of tonal functions which different tonal systems embody. It's the tonality-making function of the human brain, not some elementary acoustical characteristics of sound, which account for the "naturalness" of tonality, whether that tonality is embodied in simple pentatonic melodies or in the complex chromaticism of _Tristan und Isolde._

It shouldn't be necessary to say that there is nothing in the intuitive perceptual functioning of the human brain that could - or ever did - give rise to the ordering of music on the basis of tone rows. You do those seeking to understand music no service when you try to obscure this fundamental fact by describing the tonality of Western music as being just as artificial - "ideological" - as dodecaphony.


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## millionrainbows

Western tonality is not more "natural" than serialism or other harmonic or non-harmonic organizational systems or methods. It is just as "ideological" as any other complex system which uses chromatic resources.

Oh, boy, now the fun part: I get to edit out all of the emotive parts of the quotes which are too personal, and non-essential to the discussion.



> ...atonal serialism, as a technique for organizing musical tones, will never be anything but a contrivance fundamentally unlike tonality in its origin, application, and effect.


Western tonality, in its fully developed form, is like atonal serialism, in that it is also a contrivance. The perception of tone centers in Western tonality is now only referenced to natural harmonic models and phenomena, but which have already exceeded the bounds of what can rightly be called "natural." To Rameau, Wagner would be "noise," until he had assimilated the ideology.



> The human ear - strictly speaking, the human mind - (let's call it the ear/brain-ed.) knows this in the act of perceiving their differing musical manifestations, and perception is where the rubber meets the road.


Even in a simple modulation, the D major built on the second scale degree (in the key of C major) must be "reinterpreted" by the ear/brain as being a V chord instead of minor. Thus, the functions of Western diatonic tonality have nothing to do with relation to "I" ( C ) the obvious pitch-center, unless it conforms to the C major scale.

If "D major on II" is heard, the obvious pitch center has been relinquished in favor of a new pitch center (G major) which allows the D major to conform to the function of all diatonic major chords: either I, IV, or V, but not ii, iii, vi, or vii. This is an arbitrary mechanism, a convention of diatonicism (a particular scale), and has been "referenced" by the brain, and convention, to a new key center, G. This is only a reference; it has relinquished its key-center relation as a "II" chord.



> It's striking that you insist over and over about how the ear hears as a basis for the development of tonality in the music of mankind, yet are so ready to disregard what the ear hears in music ordered on the divergent principles of tonality and serialism.


This is precisely the point you are missing: "what" the ear hears, in the case of the D major above, is not determined by the ear, but by the brain which has been conditioned to hear it this way.

Yes, I inserted the term "Western" in parenthesis. It is necessary to distinguish between Western tonality, which is a very specific system, and general tonality, which can be based on general harmonic models (scales).

I will continue to edit-out the emotional and non-essential parts of quotes, using "…" or parenthesis to make this clear. Flat-out refutations, invalidations, and personal remarks which question my integrity will not be left in. If you would act more like a gentleman, this would not be necessary.



> (You create a)…dichotomy...between "natural" tonality...and "tonal ideologies" which...have to be acquired to recognize as tonal any pitch relationships that go beyond those scales.


Yes, that's correct, I do.



> You...desire to root "natural" tonality in the elementary, sensual perception of the fundamental and overtones heard in pitched sounds.


Yes, that's the basic form of any tonality. Beyond that, chromaticism and arbitrary mechanism begin to creep in.



> Apparently you think that tonal relations (melodic or harmonic) which utilize tones that partake of audible overtones…


No, I never said "audible" overtones, as in actual harmonics. I said "harmonic models" which are based on this.



> ...are "naturally" expected by the human ear and thus give rise to tonality spontaneously, while the perception of any other pitches and pitch relationships as tonal must be learned and is therefore "ideological" and artificial in the same sense that the serial method of composition is artificial.


Yes, that sums it up. All other perceptions, besides those primary ones, are removed, and are "references" to pitch centers which must be learned and assumed.



> I consider this theory of "natural" vs. "ideological" tonality, and the distinction it asserts, to be invalid. I believe that no particular tonal system, regardless of its simplicity or complexity, is more or less "natural" than another.


I disagree; Western tonally is full of arbitrary rules and procedures.



> What is natural is the propensity of the human mind to organize music on the principles of tone-centricity and hierarchy, a propensity which is merely a specific application of general perceptual processes.


Still, as you yourself just admitted, this is the mind, not the ear. Therefore, it is a learned, cerebral process. It might have started naturally, with the ear, but it departed.



> The actual pitch content of the scale is irrelevant, and all tonal systems are learned.


No, all the triads built on any step of any scale can be expressed as a definite ratio to the tonic, and ranked in terms of consonance/dissonance. This is what "function is: a ratio to "I" or tonic.



> More than that, they are easily learned - without an "ideology" in sight - as evidenced by the ability of most people to hear tonality at work in music alien to their own cultures, and to acquire very easily the intuitive expectations of tonal functions which different tonal systems embody.


There are harmonic models in all tonalities, so the "references" to pitch centers in Western tonality start out to be fairly easy; but by the time of Wagner and R. Strauss, chromaticism makes this quite an athletic activity for the ear/brain which is searching for centricity.



> It's the tonality-making function of the human brain, not some elementary acoustical characteristics of sound, which account for the "naturalness" of tonality, whether that tonality is embodied in simple pentatonic melodies or in the complex chromaticism of Tristan und Isolde.


This ability of the brain to perceive tonality is based on actual harmonic models, though, which are heard by the ears and "interpreted." Hearing octave equivalence is the universal basis of this, so any octave-spanning scale is interpreted as dividing the octave according to that scale.



> It shouldn't be necessary to say that there is nothing in the intuitive perceptual functioning of the human brain that could - or ever did - give rise to the ordering of music on the basis of tone rows.


Melodies are easily heard, and probably came before harmony. The intuitive perceptual functioning of the human brain is designed to seek patterns, so I'm sure it will come up with something, if it tries.



> ...you try to obscure this fundamental fact by describing the tonality of Western music as being just as artificial - "ideological" - as dodecaphony.


Both are just "sound," and while the fundamental ability of the brain to perceive tonality (based on actual harmonic models) is more directly referenced in Western tonality, it is still only "referencing" this, and when it gets complicated, as in Wagner and R. Strauss, it actually "obscures" the tonality.


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## Woodduck

The above post does nothing but repeat points you've made previously. I will nonetheless try to state succinctly the essence of my disagreement with your view of complex tonalities as "ideological" and your contention that serialism is a phenomenon of the same sort.

_All tonal systems are learned - learned, not as ideas or "ideologies," but as intuitively felt relationships governing the activity of tones and our expectations of what they will do._ No tonal system, simple or complex, is more "natural" than any other. Nature provides only two things: sounds, and the human brain which perceives and organizes data. The two fundamental principles of a tonal system - centrality (represented in music by a central pitch to which other pitches refer) and hierarchy (represented by a hierarchy of relationships in the pitches used in the system) are fundamental ordering principles that pervade the reality of the world humans experience; they are present in the process of perception, in concept formation, in moral codes, in religious belief systems, in the structures of physical reality, and in social organization. Moreover, the tonic as a point of departure and return expresses the common trajectory of both physical action and emotional experience. The pervasiveness of these principles in human experience leads naturally to their employment in the expressive forms of music.

No _ideas_ ("ideology" is misleading) need be present either to produce a tonal system or to perceive the tonal relationships in music. Tonalities are produced collectively and mostly unconsciously, and they evolve as people integrate new pitches, and relationships between pitches, into their tonal schemata, schemata which result from the normal perceptual patterning the brain utilizes to bring order to sense data. This process pertains as much to the highly evolved tonality of Wagner as it does to the simple tonality of a Native American shaman's song. Tonalities are not "ideological" as a consequence of having integrated more pitches and pitch relationships into their systems, nor as a result of harmonic complexity making tonal centers less salient. Unstable, indirect and ambiguous references to tonal centers are still tonal functions, and do not depend for their origin, perception or identification on "ideologies."

Serialism, as a procedure for constructing a musical composition, as opposed to an intuitively perceived system of relationships in a musical idiom, is a thing essentially different from tonality. The only relationship it has to tonality is that someone thought it up as a way to compensate for the loss of tonality as an integrating function in composition. And the thinking up, as well as the subsequent exploitation of the technique, had a great deal of _actual_ ideology attached to it. Symptomatic of the difference is the fact that Wagner, in all his correspondence, his nine volumes of writings about nearly everything, and his recorded conversations, had almost nothing to say about harmony, while Schoenberg and his atonalist successors devoted a great deal of time and ink to discussing it. It does appear that "tonal ideology" is of little use even to a harmonic "progressive" who assumes tonality as the bedrock of his work, while it becomes a necessary recourse, in the nature of elaborate explanations and justifications, for one who rejects that foundation.


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## millionrainbows

Woodduck said:


> The above post does nothing but repeat points you've made previously.


Then you are just as culpable, as I am responding to your comments about what I have said.

From a cursory glance at your post, you also seem to be rehashing the same old arguments.

Do you wish to continue this discussion in a more civil manner?


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## millionrainbows

Woodduck said:


> _All tonal systems are learned - learned, not as ideas or "ideologies," but as intuitively felt relationships governing the activity of tones and our expectations of what they will do._


I agree. But Western tonality is not a simple harmonic model. It has gone past those bounds. It has arbitrary methods (resolutions, cadences, modulations) which allow it to move its tonic to new stations. In this sense, it is not a "simple general tonality" like most folk and world music, but a specialized system, called Western tonality (the major/minor diatonic system).



Woodduck said:


> No tonal system, simple or complex, is more "natural" than any other.


I disagree. Western tonality is more complex than a didgeridoo player's drone. Both a based on "natural" harmonic models, but Western tonality soon departs from this simplicity, in search of new key areas. This involves arbitrary methods which aid in this process.



Woodduck said:


> Nature provides only two things: sounds, and the human brain which perceives and organizes data. The two fundamental principles of a tonal system - centrality (represented in music by a central pitch to which other pitches refer) and hierarchy (represented by a hierarchy of relationships in the pitches used in the system) are fundamental ordering principles that pervade the reality of the world humans experience; they are present in the process of perception, in concept formation, in moral codes, in religious belief systems, in the structures of physical reality, and in social organization.


I agree.



Woodduck said:


> Moreover, the tonic as a point of departure and return expresses the common trajectory of both physical action and emotional experience.


I disagree. "Points of departure and return" are characteristic of Western tonality. Indian raga, for example, does not depart from its tonic, and the Indian system of classical music represents a highly spiritually-evolved culture. Perhaps Westerners should learn a lesson from this, and learn how to "sit still."

In my personal view, "departure and return" are ideological characteristics which exemplify Western Man's desire to colonize new territory, and to dominate "static" natural cultures such as India by the British. Thank God for The Beatles!



Woodduck said:


> No _ideas_ ("ideology" is misleading) need be present either to produce a tonal system or to perceive the tonal relationships in music.


Music is non-representational, so if it represents an ideology, this will be on an unconscious, metaphorical level. Too heavy for you?



Woodduck said:


> Tonalities are not "ideological" as a consequence of having integrated more pitches and pitch relationships into their systems, nor as a result of harmonic complexity making tonal centers less salient.


I question your use of the term "tonalities" in this context. Western tonality must be considered as a singular type of music system, which originated as a simple harmonic model (the diatonic scale), but which evolved into a more complex system which only "refers" to the tonality of its original harmonic model. As you said, Western tonality integrated more pitches and pitch relationships into its system, and as a result of harmonic complexity made tonal centers less obvious, until they became abstractions.



Woodduck said:


> Unstable, indirect and ambiguous references to tonal centers are still tonal functions…


No, they are not _literal_ tonal functions, but only _refer_ to tonal functions. They have become abstractions, and thus are part of the "ideological syntax" that we know as Western tonality.



Woodduck said:


> ...and do not depend for their origin, perception or identification on "ideologies."


"They" (Western tonality) certainly do not depend on their origins in any literal way! :lol: If one perceives "them" (Western tonality's procedures) as "real" tonal functions, this is because one has assimilated the syntax. As I said earlier, Wagner would probably sound like noise to Rameau until he had "adapted" his perceptions to this strange new abstract "tonality."



Woodduck said:


> Serialism, as a procedure for constructing a musical composition, as opposed to an intuitively perceived system of relationships in a musical idiom, is a thing essentially different from tonality.


But not that different from "Western tonality." Both are arbitrary. If you keep using the term so loosely, then I will have to continue with these interruptions. 



Woodduck said:


> The only relationship it (serialism) has to tonality is that someone thought it up as a way to compensate for the loss of tonality as an integrating function in composition.


Western tonality is now only "referring" to tonality, as a way of interpreting all chromatic notes in the context of a diatonic scale. Western tonality _itself_ has shown that this increasing root movement and chromaticism resulted in a restless, rootless, almost chaotic state, and it was hardly distinguishable from early atonality and 12-tone music. Strauss' Metamorphosen is a good example, and Schoenberg's Op. 11, and Berg's Piano Sonata No. 1….So if you are going with Western tonality, you'd better go "all the way"...



Woodduck said:


> And the thinking up, as well as the subsequent exploitation of the technique, had a great deal of _actual_ ideology attached to it. Symptomatic of the difference is the fact that Wagner, in all his correspondence, his nine volumes of writings about nearly everything, and his recorded conversations, had almost nothing to say about harmony, while Schoenberg and his atonalist successors devoted a great deal of time and ink to discussing it.


Well, that's because Western tonality was the prevailing power. Wagner didn't have to speak about it, it was a given...



Woodduck said:


> It does appear that "tonal ideology" is of little use even to a harmonic "progressive" who assumes tonality as the bedrock of his work, while it becomes a necessary recourse, in the nature of elaborate explanations and justifications, for one who rejects that foundation.


As I said, this is like goldfish in a bowl, who are unaware that they are. The Western tonal environment (ideology) was "invisible" to those players who were immersed in it.


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## Vox Gabrieli

This thread is talking into circles. I am losing faith in this discussion since millionranbows and Wooduck commandeered the thread. Others are too afraid to post in fear of being attacked by a wall of text big enough to protect us from Mongols!



> Western tonality is more complex than a didgeridoo player's drone. Both a based on "natural" harmonic models, but Western tonality soon departs from this simplicity, in search of new key areas. This involves arbitrary methods which aid in this process.


The definition of what is 'natural' seems too situational to be put in such a broad statement. Less-harmonic songs featuring drones and moans would be more natural? Just because it has existed longer? This is no longer the ancient era of music, music is planned and structured. A common sign of civilized behavior.

This thread is exhausting to think about.


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## millionrainbows

Gabriel Ortiz said:


> The definition of what is 'natural' seems too situational to be put in such a broad statement. Less-harmonic songs featuring drones and moans would be more natural? Just because it has existed longer? This is no longer the ancient era of music, music is planned and structured. A common sign of civilized behavior.


The term "natural" is general in itself, but is so "situational" that it can be used to further any agenda, and it seems its most popular use is when comparing Western tonality to serial thinking.

Natural tonalities in the context of my end of this discussion mean those _general_ tonalities which are based on harmonic models. Music is simple and unified if it is exhaustively referable to a basic scale-type.

This simplest form and definition of tonality is defined exclusively vertically, not horizontally.

This means that concepts such as "dimension," "attraction," and "directionality," which are all horizontal ideas, occur _after the fact_ of vertically established tonality, and are "unnatural" in this sense, since they involve the passage of time and cognition.

Function, and tonal meaning, come first from the instantaneous perception of sound and its inner relations, not from successions of events, which simply elaborate this.

Western tonality is not "that natural," although, like all similar tonal harmonic-model systems, it started that way.

Soon after, it departs from its simple diatonic beginnings and becomes a syntax which is based on various mechanisms of voice leading, resolutions, cadences, and chord function, all of which are ways of _convincing the ear_ that the modulation or new key area is a new tonic. A look through any music textbook, such as the one pictured below, will be evidence of this.



This book, and any similar Western theory text, is an encyclopedia of the different methods, from simple to more complex, used to persuade the ear that it is hearing a new tonic, and the most effective ways to do this. From simple statements of a closely related key, to full modulations to new keys, and various ways of using chromatic chords which lie outside the starting key.

If the ear must be "persuaded" in effective ways, then major/minor tonality has become a _syntax,_ a set of rules and procedures which are used as a "method" of convincing the listener of the "naturalness" of tonal relations, especially those which involve departure, travel, and return to a key area.

Don't get lost in your assumptions; Philip Glass and Terry Riley did not, and they are at the forefront of "civilized" music, Glass having studied with Nadia Boulanger.

CP Western tonality, and its unstable diatonic scale, and the key signature system, are designed for travel and movement through different key areas, and this makes it complex, as well as unnatural, to the degree that it is a syntax which "departed" from its natural beginnings. 
I'm not criticizing this, but you can't call it 'natural.' Compared to what?


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## Vox Gabrieli

The concept of syntax has been rendered completely otiose unless described in the simplest of forms (_ phrase, CADENCE, phrase, ANOTHER CADENCE, etc etc, try not to go mad while listening_ ). Even Bernstein describes that the concept of musical syntax quickly contradicts itself as soon as a phrase refuses to resolve, and instead modulate into the next phrase. Applying this in comparison to grammar would create a paragraph like this:



> _Chompski hates Skinner but Skinner hates Chompski however do either have ill intentions? If you grant Chompski one request then again if you don't grant him that request you my allow him or not allow him to proceed violent acts of aggression followed by quick repercussions and a sudden halt in grammar development i might add.
> _


_
Moving on...

_Applying these same ideas to music sound great as far as traditional Western harmony will allow, but not in the context of the syntax-musical relation that you seem so adamant about.

millinrainbows, re-reading your previous I realize we are more or less on the same page as far as syntax goes. I do think syntax will make a nice discussion, so long as we limit the amount of Norton lecture quotes allowed. 



> CP Western tonality, and its unstable diatonic scale, and the key signature system, are designed for travel and movement through different key areas, and this makes it complex, as well as unnatural, to the degree that it is a syntax which "departed" from its natural beginnings.


So you're telling me that any pre-contemporary piece *must *resolve every phrase? Wagner, Mozart, Beethoven etc, etc frequently modulated. Contemporary music took this idea, and artistically developed it in more complex ways, certainly, but it's 'unstable diatonic scale' is just as unstable as the Phrygian mode in the context of diatonic-ism. The concept of harmony and progression you are explaining to me seems to be in the most basic of forms, meaning that leniencies almost always apply to these rules. Schoenberg admits it in ' _Fundamentals of Musical Composition _', Forte, Tchaikovsky, Korsakev, etc, etc.

Edit: It seems this thread is *MODULATING* to syntax! What fun.


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