Perfect Tuning/ end of tonality

[Kraig Grady, TD 177.2]
> Was the call to end tonality also a Spanish Inquisition?

Come on, Kraig, you know damn well (and so does everyone else
on this list) that in 'popular music' tonality never ended!
I don't think the situation is quite as grave as it's beginning
to sound.

Schoenberg and his followers saw 12-tone seralism as a way to
restore order to their pre-compositional palette of organizational
techniques. They felt that they needed it because abandoning
the traditional tonal functions left them, as Schoenberg so
aptly put it late in life, 'adrift in a sea of boiling water,
with no choice but to swim for safety'. Serialism was the
nearest shore.

(Can't find the reference for that - I believe it's in one
of Schoenberg's _Letters_).

I've just posted on the fact that Webern was accepting of
'quarter-tone' music, and have posted many times in the past
on Scheonberg's microtonal observations.

The big problem discussing this 'end of tonality' situation
is that very people who effected the musical transformation
held quite a different view of it from those who commented
on it.

Schoenberg and his pupils were viewing their free use of
the 'dissonances' as the incorporation of higher-partial
ratios into their harmonic language, in a kind of 'very
extended tonality'. Hence, Schoenberg's preference for
the term 'pantonality'.

One example, from the 75-year-old Schoenberg:

[Schoenberg, 'My Evolution', 1949, in _Style and Idea_, p 86]
>
> In my _Harmonielehre_ (1911), I maintained that the future
> would certainly prove that a centralizing power comparable to
> the gravitation exerted by the root is still operative in these
> pieces [Schoenberg's 'atonal' works of 1908]. In view of the
> fact that, for example, the laws of Bach's or Beethoven's
> structural procedures or of Wagner's harmony have not yet been
> established in a truly scientific manner, it is not surprising
> that no such attempt has been made with respect to 'atonality'.

The commentators didn't see it this way, pinned the tag
'atonality' on it, and the name (and its connotations)
stuck.

(Of course, many of the papers and books cited in my previous
post to Carl consititute the attempt to study serialism, and
tonality for that matter, 'in a truly scientific manner'.)

Joseph L. Monzo monz@juno.com
http://www.ixpres.com/interval/monzo/homepage.html
|"...I had broken thru the lattice barrier..."|
| - Erv Wilson |
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