Cast adrift in a sea of tonal ambiguity...
A few words about life and 21st century tonality from a distinctly practical and non-academic point of view:
Here's the thing about tonality: there's this relentless drive toward a resolution. It's a kind of inevitability, that once you declare your homebase, define it and then venture away from it, you ad-venture away from center until you find yourself in another key - another country - you can't remember how you got there, and you don't know how the hell you're going to get home again... and the worst of it, if you call for help - you're going to feel like a damn fool, or Wagner, or both.
How like real life, this is!
Ok, bear with me now. Tonality: the functional relationship of pitches to a single central pitch in a scale. The tonal center is like the king on a chess board, and all the rest of the pitches define that central pitch by the way they relate to it and to each other. Like, I am who I am because of the way you relate to me. and when that relationship is gone... whoops! I lose ground. my stomache gets all queezy and my head aches and I don't know where I'm going, and things pile up, and I don't have all the answers, and I become absent minded, the clutter grows, the seas swell and roil and I am cast adrift in a sea of tonal ambiguity.
There was a time when theorists believed that if it didn't sound pretty, it wasn't harmonic... that may still be true but the fact is, pretty sounds just float out here looking for resoluntion and it's dissonance that motivates! You know the urge to scratch that itch until it bleeds - that outright pain may be better than the goddamn tickle - get up and do something!
Here's the thing about tonality: there's this relentless drive toward a resolution. It's a kind of inevitability, that once you declare your homebase, define it and then venture away from it, you ad-venture away from center until you find yourself in another key - another country - you can't remember how you got there, and you don't know how the hell you're going to get home again... and the worst of it, if you call for help - you're going to feel like a damn fool, or Wagner, or both.
How like real life, this is!
Ok, bear with me now. Tonality: the functional relationship of pitches to a single central pitch in a scale. The tonal center is like the king on a chess board, and all the rest of the pitches define that central pitch by the way they relate to it and to each other. Like, I am who I am because of the way you relate to me. and when that relationship is gone... whoops! I lose ground. my stomache gets all queezy and my head aches and I don't know where I'm going, and things pile up, and I don't have all the answers, and I become absent minded, the clutter grows, the seas swell and roil and I am cast adrift in a sea of tonal ambiguity.
There was a time when theorists believed that if it didn't sound pretty, it wasn't harmonic... that may still be true but the fact is, pretty sounds just float out here looking for resoluntion and it's dissonance that motivates! You know the urge to scratch that itch until it bleeds - that outright pain may be better than the goddamn tickle - get up and do something!
posted by M. L. Place Badarak | 10:15 PM
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