# Tonal/Atonal?



## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

I think it's misleading to use the tonal/atonal dichotomy, because so much music lies in the cracks between.

There are ways of looking at music which takes into consideration all 12 notes, and different kinds of relations between these notes, that is not primarily a matter of "tonality" or "tone-centricity" as an overriding consideration. Neo-Riemann theory is emerging as the best way to deal with music in the modern era.

Music is always going to have a 'harmonic' aspect, as part of the sound itself, aside from whether it is tone-centric or not. Our ears hear sound in this way.

A major or minor triad in isolation is "tone-centric" because it has a third, a fifth, and a root. It's _largercentricity depends on how it is used in relation to other triads, and in longer passages. Debussy used parallel triads, and moved them around however he wanted. They had no traditional function, but they worked.

The real "culprit" in this tonal/atonal debate is diatonicism. Our entire Western system is founded on diatonic heptatonic scales. The primacy of the C major scale, and its counterpoint on the piano keyboard, is evidence of this. The key signature system exemplifies diatonicism, not tone-centricity or tonality in any broader sense. Tonality is nearly ubiquitous in every music created by Man, and diatonicism holds no exclusive right to this.

With Neo-Riemann analysis, we can begin to see the symmetries of relations in triads, and how these can be moved and manipulated. Music is harmonic, and has "centricities" which expand outward into larger and larger schemes. The more we examine and question "tonality," the more we begin to see that it is just a relative term.

For me, atonal music is a term referring to 12-tone and serial music which does not have a tonal hierarchy, and is also highly chromatic, and this means the 12 notes are in constant circulation. In other words, by its very nature, it avoids any sence of tone-centricity except in mopmentary glimpses of harmonic occurences, which usually do not refer to any other aspects of the work; thus, "tonality" is not present in any larger sense except singular events of harmonic color. And I hesitate to call this "tonality."_


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