# Tonality and the End of Common Practice



## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

So what went wrong?

Why, at the dawn of the twentieth century, did composers start searching for new ways to compose, even inventing new systems to escape tonality?
Had tonality exhausted itself? If not, why? What was the problem?

Just before this tonality had expanded and music flourished as never before, especially instrumental music. Composers had gained the ability to modulate freely, and build complex chromatic harmonies. This was the "golden age"of Western music. 

What went wrong? If tonality was not exhausted as a system, then what was the fly in the ointment? Does anybody know?


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## Guest (Jun 28, 2014)

I suspect that you already have answers to all these questions.

But that's OK, because I am not here to answer these questions but to question them.



millionrainbows said:


> So what went wrong?


Nothing.



millionrainbows said:


> Why, at the dawn of the twentieth century, did composers start searching for new ways to compose, even inventing new systems to escape tonality?


Why "escape"? You've studied this era pretty thoroughly. What kind of responses are you trying to elicit with this question and what are you going to do with them once you get them?



millionrainbows said:


> Had tonality exhausted itself? If not, why? What was the problem?


Tonality is a system, not a conscious entity, so any exhaustion has to be figurative. If it's literal exhaustion you're after, then you have to look at composers. But why not look at both, without exhaustion. Tonality is a system that depends upon dissonance to achieve its effects. (That "depends upon" is figurative, yes.) That is, it depends upon something that will inevitably be perceived differently as the years go by. So composers had to keep coming up with new ways to be dissonant, with new dissonances. And composers are very inventive. Get enough of them workin' the same system for long enough, and they will start perceiving that the system is getting harder and harder to work without just going over the same ground.

Some composers are fine with going over the same ground. Some are not. For the latter, it was inevitable that they would start looking somewhere else than tonality to do their work. And so, as we have seen, they did.

Not sure "problem" is quite the mot juste. It was inevitable. Just about everyone saw it coming. It wasn't like it was some big surprise. Wake up one morning and hey presto, tonality is exhausted. Nope. It was bound to happen because of how tonality works, and then it did happen and no surprise. What would have been surprising is if it had not happened. But it did happen. It had to happen. But there are plenty of other ways to make music than with keys, and so composers did just that. They even, many of them and for quite some time, managed to write fairly familiar sounding, narrative music without keys. That's surprising. Movement from key to key is how tonal music creates narrative.

Or is it?

Yes, it is. But I guess that other things contribute to that, too. And in the absence of keys, you can use the many other elements of music to create narrative music. Listen to Krenek, for example. Or Wellesz. Or Gerhard.

Of course, not everyone made narrative music. Webern, for instance. Of course Cage did not. Andre doesn't.

And also, there were composers who, having mastered a fiendishly difficult system with which they were comfortable and which made the noises they wanted to make were unwilling to accept the exhaustion of tonality. And they made a lot of very nice music indeed. For awhile. But it's hard. Pretty soon, pastiche is inevitable.

And that may indeed be a problem, yes.



millionrainbows said:


> Just before this tonality had expanded and music flourished as never before, especially instrumental music. Composers had gained the ability to modulate freely, and build complex chromatic harmonies. This was the "golden age"of Western music.


Well, I'm gonna say that Bach is pretty damn golden. As is Monteverdi. Music has always been pretty good at the flourishing business.



millionrainbows said:


> What went wrong? If tonality was not exhausted as a system, then what was the fly in the ointment? Does anybody know?


Nothing. No fly. And unanswerable because it's the wrong question.

Next week, polyphony and homophony: What went wrong? Did polyphony simply exhaust itself? The late Renaissance is a time of unparalleled musical inventiveness and variety. So what went wrong? How did the basso continuo ever get going as a thing?


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## brotagonist (Jul 11, 2013)

Could it have been the advent of the recording industry and the influences of other cultures, particularly American, that this brought to composer, musician and audience expectations? Also, as the new audience was no longer exclusively the intellectual elites, perhaps music needed to adapt to less technically savvy listeners?


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## violadude (May 2, 2011)

Let me guess, does it have anything to do with the elitist origins of Classical Music and the purist nature of it?


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## Guest (Jun 28, 2014)

Not sure what your "it" is, but the recording industry couldn't have been a factor in the move to other things besides tonality. Too late. 

And very puzzled by non-tonal being more appropriate for less technically savvy listeners. Intrigued but puzzled.

In any event, the audience change that was most influential couldn't have been a factor, either. Too early. Though I say that with serious reservations about the words "exclusively the intellectual elites," since they seem to point to no one at any time. No real people, anyway.


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## Guest (Jun 28, 2014)

I blame the modernists myself...or maybe the post-impressionists...

...or was it the impressionists? Those dadaists were mixed up in it somehow, in league with the surrealists...

Did anyone mention the fauvists?


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## SONNET CLV (May 31, 2014)

millionrainbows said:


> So what went wrong?
> 
> Why, at the dawn of the twentieth century, did composers start searching for new ways to compose, even inventing new systems to escape tonality?
> Had tonality exhausted itself?


Even Schoenberg himself would maintain that nothing actually went wrong. The composer famously maintained: "There is still plenty of good music to be written in C major." (Schoenberg to his advanced composition class at UCLA, ca. 1940)

I suggest that artists at the turn of the 20th century were reacting to a new environ in the world -- one brought on by science and Darwin and Freud and politics and the fruits of the industrial revolution and communications advances. Human suffering became more noticeable and prompted "dark" naturalistic writers, many stemming from Russia, to examine life in greater detail than ever before -- and many of the details weren't pretty. The development of psychology opened up entire new ways of thinking about human reality, and the fracturing of religion (from science and Darwin) unsettled large blocks of society. Artists naturally reached out to express the new modes of reality, and often such expression demands the invention of new techniques of expression. And if anyone had any doubts come the second decade of the 1900s, World War I would confirm that change had indeed arrived and this was not the "old world" anymore.


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## Vaneyes (May 11, 2010)

As a number have said, things weren't black and white anymore. The royal courts swayed music for a long time. Power to the people became more and more pronounced. Shock and awe more evident.


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## GreenMamba (Oct 14, 2012)

millionrainbows said:


> So what went wrong?
> 
> Why, at the dawn of the twentieth century, *did composers start searching for new ways to compose,* even inventing new systems to escape tonality?
> Had tonality exhausted itself? If not, why? What was the problem?


I know someguy has already addressed this, but really, you can't seriously believe that only then did composers start looking for new ways to compose.


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## ArtMusic (Jan 5, 2013)

SONNET CLV said:


> Even Schoenberg himself would maintain that nothing actually went wrong. The composer famously maintained: "There is still plenty of good music to be written in C major." (Schoenberg to his advanced composition class at UCLA, ca. 1940)
> ....


Interesting quote, if only Shoenberger and the 2nd Viennese School were talented enough to write great music in C major. That was the real challenge. They knew deep in their minds they were not going to compete with Beethoven to Bartok, so had to come up with "tonality is exhausted" reason.


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## ArtMusic (Jan 5, 2013)

millionrainbows said:


> So what went wrong?
> 
> Why, at the dawn of the twentieth century, did composers start searching for new ways to compose, even inventing new systems to escape tonality?
> Had tonality exhausted itself? If not, why? What was the problem?
> ...


I think more to do with the talent of the composers. Very few were of that calibre come turn of the 20th century around after the 2nd world war.


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## mmsbls (Mar 6, 2011)

ArtMusic said:


> I think more to do with the talent of the composers. Very few were of that calibre come turn of the 20th century around after the 2nd world war.


But wouldn't that be in some sense incredibly odd? There were many more people living in the 20th century than before 1900. Many more of those people received good educations. Recording technology allowed people to hear vastly more varied music and more often than ever before. I can't think of one reason why composers of the 20th century would be any worse, and there appear to be several reasons to expect them to be better than earlier.


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

mmsbls said:


> But wouldn't that be in some sense incredibly odd? There were many more people living in the 20th century than before 1900. Many more of those people received good educations. Recording technology allowed people to hear vastly more varied music and more often than ever before. I can't think of one reason why composers of the 20th century would be any worse, and there appear to be several reasons to expect them to be better than earlier.


Unless, of course, the most musically talented people have moved to pastures other than what we call "classical music." An unpleasant thought that we'd prefer not to think, naturally.


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## Guest (Jun 29, 2014)

It might be a thought that could be verified pretty easily, though.

If one could convincingly define "most musically talented people," anyway.

That can't be done, of course, but let's pretend for a moment that it's already been done: Did the most musically talented people move to pastures other than what we call "classical music"? No need to speculate. We can just look at what actually happened.


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## ArtMusic (Jan 5, 2013)

mmsbls said:


> But wouldn't that be in some sense incredibly odd? There were many more people living in the 20th century than before 1900. Many more of those people received good educations. Recording technology allowed people to hear vastly more varied music and more often than ever before. I can't think of one reason why composers of the 20th century would be any worse, and there appear to be several reasons to expect them to be better than earlier.


Reasoning sounds well thought out. The recording technology has actually helped to expand the interest of old music. One of my elderly uncles said today there are just so much more older music (he was talking about Baroque, Renaissance etc.) than even twenty years ago or thirty years ago.


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## violadude (May 2, 2011)

ArtMusic said:


> I think more to do with the talent of the composers. Very few were of that calibre come turn of the 20th century around after the 2nd world war.


This is, of course, absolutely right. By the time we hit the 20th century, most of the earth's talent dust had already been mined out and used up.


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## Kilgore Trout (Feb 26, 2014)

ArtMusic said:


> Interesting quote, if only Shoenberger and the 2nd Viennese School were talented enough to write great music in C major. That was the real challenge. They knew deep in their minds they were not going to compete with Beethoven to Bartok, so had to come up with "tonality is exhausted" reason.


But Schoenberg did write great music in major/minor before 1907-08. Remember _Pelleas et Mélisande_ ? _La nuit transfigurée_ ? The _ Kammersymphonie_ ? _Friede auf Erden_ ? The early lieders ? Not works by some untalented wack.

AND

Schoenberg even wrote tonal music after he came with the serial system. _Kol Nidre_ (1938) is a tonal work, and it's great. The _Theme and variations_ op.43 is tonal too. He finished the second Kammersymphonie in 1939. The Drei Volksliedsätze from 1929 are tonal too.


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## Piwikiwi (Apr 1, 2011)

ArtMusic said:


> I think more to do with the talent of the composers. Very few were of that calibre come turn of the 20th century around after the 2nd world war.


Sure because Stravinsky, Schönberg, Xenakis, Stockhausen, Prokofiev, Berg, Webern, Messiaen, Debussy, Ravel, Hindemith, Poulenc, Honegger, Milhaud, Boulez, Cage, Glass, Reich, Adams, Ligeti, Riley, Takemitsu and Bartok to name a few are all untalented


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

ArtMusic said:


> Interesting quote, if only Shoenberger and the 2nd Viennese School were talented enough to write great music in C major. That was the real challenge. They knew deep in their minds they were not going to compete with Beethoven to Bartok, so had to come up with "tonality is exhausted" reason.


Schoenberg did not make any such excuse, because, as a matter of fact, he did not believe that he was writing "atonal" music. He was writing music that was an extension of the tradition he knew (and Bartok was writing in response to Schoenberg, not the other way around).

Also, as Kilgore Trout has pointed out, he did continue to write music "in a key", throughout his entire life.

Schoenberg was the Beethoven of the 20th century, in terms of lasting influence on everyone who has come since, whether or not they accepted his music. The fact that more people listen more often to his music now than they ever did during his life shows that Schoenberg isn't likely to go away. You can either ignore him, or accept him. You can't pretend that he wasn't a great composer and still claim to have any belief in the "test of time".


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

The exhaustion of tonality never happened. What did happen? New areas were opened up for exploration and cultivation while many composed wonderful, highly original music with tonal centers throughout the twentieth century. What did the malcontents think happened? A great many folks without imagination declared that tonality was exhausted, a great many folks without imagination declared that the new paths and alternative systems signaled the end of civilization. They were wrong, all of them. In fact, it was the best of all possible worlds — aesthetically speaking of course ;-)


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## SONNET CLV (May 31, 2014)

Mahlerian said:


> Schoenberg did not make any such excuse, because, as a matter of fact, he did not believe that he was writing "atonal" music. He was writing music that was an extension of the tradition he knew (and Bartok was writing in response to Schoenberg, not the other way around).
> 
> Also, as Kilgore Trout has pointed out, he did continue to write music "in a key", throughout his entire life.
> 
> Schoenberg was the Beethoven of the 20th century, in terms of lasting influence on everyone who has come since, whether or not they accepted his music. The fact that more people listen more often to his music now than they ever did during his life shows that Schoenberg isn't likely to go away. You can either ignore him, or accept him. You can't pretend that he wasn't a great composer and still claim to have any belief in the "test of time".


The following is a post I provided on a different thread yesterday. It was spurred by another insightful reply from Mahlerian.



Mahlerian said:


> Anyone who says the man didn't have range simply has no clue what they're talking about.


I once presented a class (the topic had to do with art, the definition of art, and contemporary art) and presented snippets of several pieces by Arnold Schoenberg, without announcing to the class that they were the work of a single composer. We then had a discussion about the merits of the various pieces, which began, I think, with the Cello Concerto (after Monn), moved to the opening from _Gurrelieder_ and then a bit of the _Verklärte Nacht _and ranged through several of the atonal pieces to eventually arrive at _Pierrot Lunaire_. The students had the impression that the selection represented a range of 18th, 19th, and 20th century composition, which obviously degenerated by the time the 20th century came round and _Pierrot Lunaire _was penned by some madman. The point I really wanted to make was that a great modern artist, one known for works of "madness", was generally a very capable "traditionally trained" technician who _decides_ to create modernistic works. It wasn't that Schoenberg was incapable of writing "nice sounding" music, he _wanted _to move into a different realm of expression for his own artistic reasons. Most students were shocked when I revealed that all the pieces I played had been written by the same composer -- the same madman who had written that goofy sounding _Lunaire _(or Loonier) piece.

I recall I used Jackson Pollock as a graphic artist representation, showing some of his early realistic works before presenting the _Lavender Mist _era work. Could Jackson Pollock really draw like Michelangelo???

View attachment 45537

Jackson Pollock. Senza titolo, 1937-39.

View attachment 45538

Jackson Pollock. Lavender Mist, No. 1. 1950.


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## SONNET CLV (May 31, 2014)

KenOC said:


> Unless, of course, the most musically talented people have moved to pastures other than what we call "classical music." An unpleasant thought that we'd prefer not to think, naturally.


A valid observation. Of course the modern world provides many more opportunities than did the "older" world, and education today offers more people more potential avenues. I reflect not so much on where our talented people of today are "moved to", but rather how many talented people of the past never had an opportunity to "move" anywhere at all. It's the theme of English poet Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" in which the poet stands at grave sites in the Stoke Poges cemetery and ponders the lives of the people lying below. How many hidden geniuses, talents who never had a chance to flourish, to become Hamptons, Miltons, or Cromwells, lie unknown because of the circumstances of their births. As Gray puts it (beginning at line 45):

Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid 
Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire; 
Hands that the rod of empire might have swayed, 
Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre.

But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page 
Rich with the spoils of time did ne'er unroll; 
Chill Penury repressed their noble rage, 
And froze the genial current of the soul. 

Because of poor education and/or poverty such folks never could become great political leaders or musicians. (It's pertinent that Gray actually cites musicians in the poem.)

Yes, our current century should be producing many more visible talents than we saw previously, and that's a good thing. The end of music and the other arts (and sciences, and advances in all kinds of arenas) is far from any reality. We're actually in good hands. And we must work to make those hands better all over the world, simply for our world's sake.


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## Guest (Jun 29, 2014)

millionrainbows said:


> Had tonality exhausted itself? If not, why?


I think some guy covered most of the querying responses needed to the OP, but I've just reflected again on this one...

"Had tonality exhausted itself? If not (ie if it hadn't exhausted itself) why (hadn't it exhausted itself)?"

What an odd question. _Should _tonality have exhausted itself, millionrainbows?

As for whether anyone 'knows' what was going on at the beginning of the 20thC, I'd say, yes, lots of people. Read any of the multitude of books about the emergence of modernism across the arts at the time and you'll find out what they know. I found Bradbury and McFarlane most useful when I was studying it 35 years ago.


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

Musically, the growing desire of composers to modulate to more distant keys, and their increasing use of chromaticism, gradually gave rise to Equal Temperament, which took the latter part of the 19th century, and into 1919 to completely accomplish. The piano was also being perfected and improved, an instrument which lends itself well to Equal temperament.

Socio-economically, the rise of equal temperament, and increasing industrialization, brought improvements to wind and brass instruments, and ET made it easy to mass-produce instruments in uniform ET tuning.

Equal temperament is the embodiment of all things visual, uniform, continuous, and connected; it divides the octave evenly, geometrically, based on factors of twelve, in equal quantities, and ignoring inner-octave ratios and relations, which are more relative than quantative. Thus, the aural 'identity' and *quality* of the consonant ratios, which tonality had originally been founded on, was gradually brushed aside in favor of _*quantity, *_and uniformity over a wide range of keys, which exemplifies a quantitative, visual perspective which eschews the more nebulous _qualities and identities _of ear music.

The world had become rational; increasing industrialization had little use for the dark, sensual, unpredictable world of sound, which differed from a visual world in that events are sudden, appearing out of nowhere, unconnected, isolated, moment-by-moment, whereas the visual is predictable, encompassing, all-at-once, and continuous.

Industrialization and mass-production are visual technologies, in that they embody uniform, continuous, and connected processes. The old tonality was originally based on the ear, which perceived small-ratio consonances in terms of waves, beating, and aural phenomena (*identities/relations* as opposed to* quantities*) unconnected to visual and geometric/numeric division. Notation further pressured music away from the ear into the realm of the visual; and the general thrust of civilization was toward uniformity, continuity, narrative processes, writing, and the visual in general.

Modern artists did reflect the old aural ways, as in Varese's mysterious, 'tribal' sounding compositions of pure sound; Debussy's treatment of sound as pure sensual 'stuff' to be moved around at whim; etc.


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## SONNET CLV (May 31, 2014)

Of course, tonality as we understand it is largely a European construct, and "classical music" largely derives from that European tradition. At least until the 20th century when the tonalities of other cultures, tonalities that were "different sounding" than that of the European heritage, came to be explored by composers.

But can even the diatonic scale ever exhaust possibilities for music making? According to the statistics of permutations, there are over _40,000_ melodies that can derive from a series of 8 notes using only each note once. Which means the 12-tone row folks will be going towards "exhaustion" long after the diatonic folks have met their end ... but that 40,000 plus doesn't include repeating a note. No ... there's no exhaustion of possibilities in sight.

But music is more interesting for the expansion of possibilities. (As I type I'm listening to Jean Barraqué's _Concerto_. Some of you know what that's about, I'm sure.)


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

millionrainbows said:


> Musically, the growing desire of composers to modulate to more distant keys, and their increasing use of chromaticism, gradually gave rise to Equal Temperament, which took the latter part of the 19th century, and into 1919 to completely accomplish. The piano was also being perfected and improved, an instrument which lends itself well to Equal temperament.


To what are you referring? What do you believe was added to the theory and practice of ET in the 1910s?



millionrainbows said:


> Socio-economically, the rise of equal temperament, and increasing industrialization, brought improvements to wind and brass instruments, and ET made it easy to mass-produce instruments in uniform ET tuning.


The adoption of ET has no connection to industrialization. ET was adopted before industrialization had any effect on instrument construction or any other relevant aspect of musical life and technology (see questions above). Wind instruments in just tuning, quarter-comma tuning, or any other tuning would have been just as easy to standardize and mass produce.



millionrainbows said:


> Equal temperament is the embodiment of all things visual, uniform, continuous, and connected; it divides the octave evenly, geometrically, based on factors of twelve, in equal quantities, and ignoring inner-octave ratios and relations, which are more relative than quantative.


Your theories on visual versus ear music are based on vague, arbitrary, and idiosyncratic games of word association, none of which stands up to scrutiny.



millionrainbows said:


> Thus, the aural 'identity' and *quality* of the consonant ratios, which tonality had originally been founded on, was gradually brushed aside in favor of _*quantity, *_and uniformity over a wide range of keys, which exemplifies a quantitative, visual perspective which eschews the more nebulous _qualities and identities _of ear music.


In Ancient Greece the consonant ratios were derived geometrically and visually by the division of strings into uniform divisions.



millionrainbows said:


> The world had become rational; increasing industrialization had little use for the dark, sensual, unpredictable world of sound


Huh? A baseless generalization, which is what I would write under every other clause in your post.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

millionrainbows said:


> So what went wrong?
> 
> Why, at the dawn of the twentieth century, did composers start searching for new ways to compose, even inventing new systems to escape tonality?
> Had tonality exhausted itself? If not, why? What was the problem?
> ...


I don't know if tonality exhausted itself, it certainly didn't exhaust itself for all composers. Of course composers like Liszt and Wagner pushed tonality to the limit, and you had a number of composers going fully atonal. Schoenberg of course came out of that late Romantic tradition.

Composers after had to decide whether to keep pushing or push just a bit, or do other things. There where many innovations in the 20th century, and I think its fair to say that most of them have precursors in previous centuries. Strong directions developed such as going into directions such as folk, chance-based procedures, world music (esp. Asian, early on). Innovations didn't only happen around tonality but also rhythm, sonority, thematic development and form. You had them streching back to previous eras, like the Classical era, also to modal music of ancient times.

We don't really have to separate these things, but what I'm saying is that the move beyond the diatonic system was part of other changes happening, and they have a history. Nothing happens in a vacuum, its not a matter of constantly reinventing the wheel. New music tends to build upon old music in some way.

So there where a lot of directions, as always in music there was plurality. The problem I have with 20th century music is that its got a lot of ideologies attached, I think too many. Composers of the past innovated and did exciting things, but seldom was there a need to shout about it from the rooftops, so to speak. With Modernity you got a lot of theorising and establishment of schools, cliques. Again, there are precursors to this in the 19th century with the opposing New German and Central German schools. You had this need to set up a dichotomy in music, and with the 20th century developments there was a splintering around atonality, serialism and other things. Its as if there was a need to build these fortresses.

The reality as I see it as there is plurality in music, and the more we build fences the more we focus on things that in the end are just technical or aesthetic choices each composer makes. If there was a fly in the ointment so to speak, it was ideology especially of an authoritarian and dogmatic kind, trying to force a certain idea of progress or innovation in the dichotomous ways I was talking about.

Also, there might have been some sort of Golden Age, say if we look at the core repertoire most modern orchestras play around the world, most of it is music between 1750 and 1950. So in some respects I can understand where you're coming from with that.


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## aleazk (Sep 30, 2011)

From Wikipedia:

"Verklärte Nacht was controversial when it was premiered in 1902. A particular point of controversy was the use of a single 'nonexistent' (that is, uncategorized and therefore unpermitted) inverted ninth chord, which resulted in its rejection by the Vienna Music Society. Schoenberg remarked _"and thus (the work) cannot be performed since one cannot perform that which does not exist"_"

So, the dilemma was ontological in nature! Schoenberg was to music what Heisenberg for physics!


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

SONNET CLV said:


> Of course, tonality as we understand it is largely a European construct, and "classical music" largely derives from that European tradition. At least until the 20th century when the tonalities of other cultures, tonalities that were "different sounding" than that of the European heritage, came to be explored by composers.


No, tonality (as it is broadly defined as "music which is based around a key note with a tonal center") is based on acoustic aural principles, which involve small-number ratio intervals, which sound consonant.



SONNET CLV said:


> But can even the diatonic scale ever exhaust possibilities for music making? According to the statistics of permutations, there are over _40,000_ melodies that can derive from a series of 8 notes using only each note once. Which means the 12-tone row folks will be going towards "exhaustion" long after the diatonic folks have met their end ... but that 40,000 plus doesn't include repeating a note. No ... there's no exhaustion of possibilities in sight.


...But tonality is largely defined by what it leaves out, not what it includes. The pentatonic scale is very tonal, and gets its character and strength from the fact that it has no fourth scale degree, or tritone.


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## SONNET CLV (May 31, 2014)

Concerning the previous post ....
 
* ?*


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

EdwardBast said:


> To what are you referring? What do you believe was added to the theory and practice of ET in the 1910s?


It was finally accomplished with the advent of electrical frequency counters, and the publication of White's book, which had tables that went to several decimal points.

Before that, time was used: stopwatches were used to count 'beating'f waves, so ET was *attempted, but not fully achieved,* until this time. See book, "How Equal Temperament..."












EdwardBast said:


> The *adoption* of ET has no connection to industrialization. ET was* adopted* before industrialization had any effect on instrument construction or any other relevant aspect of musical life and technology.


ET was not 'adopted' all at once, it was achieved slowly. It was an idea that was in the air as far back as Bach's 'well' tempering, but true ET was not achieved until the early 20th century. They might have called it ET, but it was one of several working variants in use, until true ET was achieved. If you look at the figures, many of the ET methods before that varied considerably.

For validation of these ideas, see the above book as well as:












EdwardBast said:


> ...Wind instruments in just tuning, quarter-comma tuning, or any other tuning would have been just as easy to standardize and mass produce....


Nahh...



EdwardBast said:


> Your theories on visual versus ear music are based on vague, arbitrary, and idiosyncratic games of word association, none of which stands up to scrutiny.... baseless generalization(s), which is what I would write under every other clause in your post.


Read some McLuhan or any current book on the subject, such as Chris Cutler's "File Under Popular."



EdwardBast said:


> In Ancient Greece the consonant ratios were derived geometrically and visually by the division of strings into uniform divisions.


Apparently, you do not understand how intervals are expressed as ratios, or you would not see a contradiction between geometric division and the consonances. Those proportions exist simultaneously as consonances heard aurally. Pythagoras' mistake was in trying to 'cycle' those 3:2 fifths into the octave, 2:1. It can't be done.

Geometry thus became the arithmetic of the 12 limit. Flawed, flawed. Arithmetic is quantity, not proportion. Quantity is visual. Quality, or proportion, is aural and geometric.

I'm really talking about some subtle distinctions here when I speak of aural vs. visual, and some background is required to fully 'grok' these concepts. I'm moving on.


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

Some of the factors which contributed to the dissolution of common practice tonality:

Use of non-chord tones
Emphasis on melody, more counterpoint
Use of synthetic scales


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