source file: mills2.txt Date: Thu, 5 Dec 1996 01:13:10 -0800 Subject: Re: Tonality: Are we all Cagians, now? From: Daniel Wolf <106232.3266@compuserve.com> Gary Morrison wrote: ** Speaking for my own opinions and experience, tonality is a useful tool open to a composer. Using that tool (or any other) is not mandatory but it can be useful, largely for the obvious purpose: creating that familiar "coming back home" sensation in your music. ** This is somewhat akin to the way in which Klarenz Barlough uses his _Autobus_ programs. For Barlowe, **tonality** is a function or set of functions whose parametric values can be set as desired by the composer; in other words, you can turn the tonality on, up, down, or off. (The simularity between this approach and the recent **principles and parameters** approach of Chomsky is obvious; remarkably, Charles Seeger, Cowells teacher - and Cage and Harrison's grandteacher - in his article on _Dissonant Counterpoint_ (in _Modern Music_ca 1930), proposed a similar usage of alternative parameter values in species counterpoint). This contrasts with the traditional function of **tonality** which was to structure a piece over time (although Gary alludes to this as **coming back**). Functional harmonic analysis used exact returns over an (implicit or explicit) tuning lattice to describe this structure, Schenker proposed a model based upon linear diminutions of a single source chord (the Major triad). (Various **extensions** to **tonality** could be mentioned: increased chordal density, altered chords, the Skyriabinist school, where a static source chord is used both harmonically and melodically, Stravinsky's playing off of diatonic and octotonic materials, or his dialectically playful use of tonal **mistakes**; none of these, however, presents a challenge to the essential mechanisms of **tonality** per se.) Alternatives to **tonality** as an organizing principle include the Schoenberg-Babbitt model of pitch class and aggregate (extended by Babbitt to several levels and to other acoustical parameters) consumption, Carter's exhaustive use of interval controls (which I believe were discovered by Lou Harrison), Xenakis' set structure in _Herma_ (La Monte Young uses a strikingly similar set organization - albeit sets with rational relationships - in TWTP; Yuji Takahashi, indebted to both Xenakis and Young, has also made interesting music - in Just intonation - using set structures), Stockhausen's diminutions of motives (or, as he calls them: formulas), and Boulezīs multiplications of a motive to create larger structures. None of these approaches, however, has really found an enduring following. In contrast stands John Cage, who, partially following Varese's attempt to integrate noises, proposed the divorce of a works division into temporal units from a unique definition of those units by tonal means. It is perhaps very difficult today to imagine how radical this suggestion was. Until very recently in the western world (and still true in many places), the academic study of music was largely identical with the study of functional harmony. >From our present perspective - being able to splice in some **tonality** with a sequencer, or turning the **tonality** on or off like a thermostat with an algorithm, and the entire disjunctive tonal experience offered in the media - Cage's proposal seems a commonplace. Even Cage's leading European antagonist, Luigi Nono, while objecting to the use of indeterminacy and chance operations as compositional abdication, used composerly brute force to fill his large-scale forms with materials, including tonal allusions or fragments, unrelated by functional tonal schemes. In short, and in this regard, we have all become Cagians. Daniel Wolf, Frankfurt Received: from ns.ezh.nl [137.174.112.59] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Fri, 6 Dec 1996 14:15 +0100 Received: by ns.ezh.nl; (5.65v3.2/1.3/10May95) id AA20052; Wed, 4 Dec 1996 23:59:09 +0100 Received: from eartha.mills.edu by ns (smtpxd); id XA21244 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id OAA07724; Wed, 4 Dec 1996 14:59:06 -0800 Date: Wed, 4 Dec 1996 14:59:06 -0800 Message-Id: Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu