# Woodduck's Post #161 in Mozart's Genius



## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

Woodduck said:


> Now that the expected (blunt) arrows have begun to fly (yawn), I will remind the archers that tonality has more than one definition, and that Western "common practice" is the narrower one. When music is studied from a neurological, psychological, anthropological, or evolutionary perspective, a broader definition of tonality, which includes modality, is accepted as more basic, encompassing, and useful.
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> In that definition, tonality refers to the recognition of a specific note (or, sometimes, notes) of a musical scale as having certain unique, central functions in the organization of musical material, serving variously as a point of origin, a final destination, a stabilizer, a point of rest, and a determinant of other hierarchical relationships among notes of whatever scale the music utilizes. This "tonic" note, and the organization of music around it, the latter most often including a position of secondary importance given the fifth note above the tonic, is found in indigenous musics worldwide, whether they are purely melodic or harmonic in character. Western harmonic music has elaborated the most complex system of hierarchies around the tonic, and these harmonic relationships have engendered a great number and complexity of forms, and constitute a basic aspect of formal coherence. But the formal structure of non-common-practice music also exhibits hierarchies - relative degrees of importance among notes - and specific melodic and harmonic (the latter perhaps only implicit) functions in relation to a tonic.
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