bitonality

> I think Milhaud wrote about this himself in an early article,
> in his book that I know I have
> somewhere but couldn't find just now (sorry!).
> If my memory serves me right, he gives examples of polychords
> and warns that if you put a g
> minor chord on top of a C major chord it's hard to hear this as
> bitonal since it's a C 9 chord.

Yeah, this is the way I always think of bitonality: you've got your two keys, which you could, if you wanted to, hear as separate entities. But you can also hear their resulting combination--which would often (always?) priviledge the lower key, since we hear harmonic identity from the bass up. Music is rich, why say that it's GOT to be one of the other (2 keys, vs. 1 key with lots of wierd stuff on top)?

When I was writing my piano sonata (which I now have a live performance of which I'll be posting soon), the development section of the first movement was a long stream of bitonality . . and I carefully considered the combined effect of the two streams at any given point. I think Carl's example of Bb Major atop E Major. . . I thought "yeah, that's gonna sound dominant-y, a very rich E-dominant chord with #5, b9, etc. etc." .. so I used that combination (actually it was G with C# up above) at the end of the development, for a powerful dominant leading back to the recap.

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Another way of thinking about bitonality was suggested to me by a passage from Schoenberg (from the 1st string quartet (which is "tonal")), and another passage from a Bach chorale.

The Schoenberg example is a sudden, slow chorale of sorts, played sul ponticello by the quartet, in the 3rd movement (slow movement). You can't miss it.

The first and last chords are e minor, and there's a bunch of wierd chormatically related triads in between, and so you can hear it as sorta in e minor. But the top melody line goes B---D-C#-B---C#-D-C#-B---, which sounds like it's in b minor. You really can hear the passage in either 'key' . . .to my ear it's a much more subtle way of being "bitonal" than just writing some dissonant counterpoint in 2 different keys on top of one another---in this case, different elements of ONE inseparable wad of music point to one key or the other.

However, dissonant counterpoint is fun too.

C Bailey