Tonality

Tonality is the arrangement of pitches and / or chords of a musical work in a hierarchy of perceived relations, stabilities, attractions, and directionality.

[vague] Harmony in jazz includes many but not all tonal characteristics of the European common practice period, usually known as "classical music".

From this point of view, twelve-tone music could be regarded "either as the natural and inevitable culmination of an organic motivic process (Webern) or as a historical Aufhebung (Adorno), the dialectical synthesis of late Romantic motivic practice on the one hand with a musical sublimation of tonality as pure system on the other".

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

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

Dominant function requires a major-quality triad with a root a perfect fifth above the affiliated tonic and containing the leading tone of the key.

[15] David Cope[16] considers key, consonance and dissonance (relaxation and tension, respectively), and hierarchical relationships the three most basic concepts in tonality.

Genres such as heavy metal, new wave, punk rock, and grunge music "took power chords into new arenas, often with a reduced emphasis on tonal function.

These properties are represented by a unique set of rules dictating the unfolding of harmonic function, voice-leading conventions, and the overall behavior of chord tones and chordal extensions".

The term tonalité (tonality) was first used in 1810 by Alexandre Choron in the preface Sommaire de l'histoire de la musique[26] to the Dictionnaire historique des musiciens artistes et amateurs (which he published in collaboration with François-Joseph-Marie Fayolle) to describe the arrangement of the dominant and subdominant above and below the tonic—a constellation that had been made familiar by Rameau.

[27] According to Choron, the beginnings of this modern tonality are found in the music of Claudio Monteverdi around the year 1595, but it was more than a century later that the full application of tonal harmony finally supplanted the older reliance on the melodic orientation of the church modes, in the music of the Neapolitan School — most especially that of Francesco Durante.

He described his earliest example of tonalité moderne thus: "In the passage quoted here from Monteverdi's madrigal (Cruda amarilli, mm.

[31] His prophetic vision of the omnitonic order (though he didn't approve it personally) as the way of further development of tonality was a remarkable innovation to historic and theoretic concepts of the 19th century.

Fétis believed that tonality, tonalité moderne, was entirely cultural, saying, "For the elements of music, nature provides nothing but a multitude of tones differing in pitch, duration, and intensity by the greater or least degree ...

The conception of the relationships that exist among them is awakened in the intellect, and, by the action of sensitivity on the one hand, and will on the other, the mind coordinates the tones into different series, each of which corresponds to a particular class of emotions, sentiments, and ideas.

In contrast, Hugo Riemann believed tonality, "affinities between tones" or Tonverwandtschaften, was entirely natural and, following Moritz Hauptmann,[36] that the major third and perfect fifth were the only "directly intelligible" intervals, and that I, IV, and V, the tonic, subdominant, and dominant were related by the perfect fifths between their root notes.

[40] In the music of some late-Romantic or post-Romantic composers such as Richard Wagner, Hugo Wolf, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Anton Bruckner, Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, Alexander Scriabin, and others, we find a variety of harmonic and linear procedures that have the effect of weakening functional tonality.

[44] A viewpoint held by many theorists since the third quarter of the 19th century, following the publication in 1862 of the first edition of Helmholtz's On the Sensation of Tone,[45] holds that diatonic scales and tonality arise from natural overtones.

He describes melodic tonality (the term coined independently and 10 years earlier by Estonian composer Jaan Soonvald[47]) as being "entirely different from the classical type," wherein, "the whole line is to be understood as a musical unit mainly through its relationship to this basic note [the tonic]," this note not always being the tonic as interpreted according to harmonic tonality.

[50] Felix Wörner, Ullrich Scheideler, and Philip Rupprecht in the introduction to a collection of essays dedicated to the concept and practice of tonality between 1900 and 1950 describe it generally as "the awareness of key in music".

Cristle Collins Judd (the author of many articles and a thesis dedicated to the early pitch systems) found "tonalities" in this sense in motets of Josquin des Prez.

Peter Lefferts found "tonal types" in the French polyphonic chanson of the 14th century,[58] Italian musicologists Marco Mangani and Daniele Sabaino in the late Renaissance music,[59] and so on.

In the neo-Riemannian theory of the late 20th century, however, the same chromatic chord relations cited by Riemann came to be regarded as a fundamental example of nontonal triadic relations, reinterpreted as a product of the hexatonic cycle (the six-pitch-class set forming a scale of alternating minor thirds and semitones, Forte's set-type 6–20, but manifested as a succession of from four to six alternating major and minor triads), defined without reference to a tonic.

[3] For example, the closing bars of the first movement of Béla Bartók's Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta do not involve a composed-out triad, but rather a diverging-converging pair of chromatic lines moving from a unison A to an octave E♭ and back to a unison A again, providing a framing "deep structure" based on a tritone relationship that nevertheless is not analogous to a tonic-dominant axis, but rather remains within the single functional domain of the tonic, A.