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Tonality: why? why not? why bother asking?

  
 
at the scarwash
19:29 / 20.11.05
So go.

Okay, just kidding.

My recent musical directions have made me think a lot about tonality. In my (not very impressive or original) work, I really just don't deal with it. Any noise has equal value, depending upon placement and context. Sure, I play a little stylophone from tiome to time, and sometimes against all odds a happy little melody in a perfect C major scale falls out. But that's really just about working wiith the material at hand.

I'm not at all theory trained. I can read music about as well as I can Spanish, slowly and clumsily, with no concept of tense, and I must have a dictionary close at hand. But just to lay down (initial) terms for the discussion, I will give a basic explanation of what I am meaning when I use the word "tonality."

Tonality is a system of music with absolute tonal values, ie notes. They have fixed intervals, and there are rules about which ones play together well and which ones will eat each other alive, such as keys, scales, and modes. I am not singling out Western tonality as something to escape from, nor am I ignoring Harry Parch, Pythagoras, and other theoreticians of just intonation. (briefly, the note values currently used in Western music exist so that intervals on a piano keyboard would be constant across octaves. Otherwise you'd have to retune the damn thing every time you change keys. Just intonation systems have tried to escape the supposedly less felicitous intervals of equal temperment by creating other systems, involving a lot of building of new instruments and notational systems. 43 notes to the octave looks really messy on a staff.)

But why? why not just listen? I'm not calling for the abolition of traditional musics or their relegation to a museum of repetory. Ahem. But if beautiful music can be made from any old noise laying around, what is the point?

I certainly don't have answers, and this is certainly not a new question. I just want to know what you have to say.
 
 
at the scarwash
19:56 / 20.11.05
I should throw out some examples for discussion. I think that a lot of musics that would qualify as noise or atonal, such as Merzbow, Reynols, Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music, some of Pauline Oliveros' work, can be (for me) more breathtakingly beautiful than anything tonal.

For me, traditional hierarchical tonality is as arbitrary as some of the mbira tuning systems used in Zimbabwean music where each tine on the mbira (kalimba or thumb piano) is tuned to the voice of an ancestral spirit. Or, to return to Pauline Oliveros, the improvisational Carrier Band recoding Automatic Inscription of Speech Melody uses as its tonal and rhythmic center readings from the technical notebooks of pioneering electonic instrument builder Harald Bode.

Why are kids still buying guitars?

Hip hop music has shown us that songs do not have to be tonal (samples in different keys and speeds superimposed) to be danceable and saleable. Why do we stick to these systems so fiercely in music instruction? No doubt they're great ways to instill discipline, and provide excellent teaching methods. But doesn't it serve to close ears that could benefit from escaping tonal systems?

I make no claims that what I have to say is intelligent, informed, or at all my own idea.

some links for further reading:

  
 
matthew.
22:10 / 20.11.05
Before I say anything, I just want to say that I'm not theory-trained whatsoever. I can read music, but when I write, it's all in my head. I never write down a melody.

The reason why the music I write in my head relies heavily on the Western tones, etc, is because that's what I've been listening to for all my life.

The music I write is deriative of everything I've ever heard. I don't mean this as a positive or a negative thing at all. It's simply a thing that happens. Music builds on previous sounds, and if all the previous sounds I've ever heard are in a Western tone system, then all the sounds I plan to make are going to be. But that's just me. I'm not a musical genius.

When somebody who is a musical genius - and I don't mean the hyperbole filled compliment that the music critics splash over everybody; I mean the real geniuses: Mozart, Bach, Wagner, Morricone - when somebody is a musical genius, they tend to think in mathematics, do they not? According to what I've read about child prodigies and savants, there are only two true kinds: musical and mathematical and they are generally the same thing. Music relies heavily on math - see Pythagoras. I think that's the answer here: the reason why Western music relies on a tonal system is because our Western mathematics are so heavily influenced by Pythagoras and his followers.

But this is just my opinion. I don't present it as fact.
 
 
Crux Is This City's Protector.
03:19 / 21.11.05
This is a discussion that has always at its base perplexed me. Starting from the first capital-A Atonal music, the argument was: tonal music is old and stale, we need a new music for the future, with new horizons and new sounds. Et cetera. That's a very admirable and fruitful statement, but like all Modernist stances it doesn't fare well with time; Schoernberg and Varese sound dated now (though popular taste has not kept up, so they certainly do keep their veneer of modernity better for someone who hasn't been keeping total track of things).

Then you've got Cage come along, and he basically laid out what I think you've taken as your basic conceit; all sounds are equal, to privilege some set of pitches arbitrarily makes no sense. And that's cool, and definitely useful and fruitful, and insightful.

I have to responses to this, then, and the first, and certainly more facile of them, is: if all notes are equally valuable and beautiful, then why are we insisting on an artifical division between Tonal and Atonal? Why are we still drawing lines in the sand, and more troublingly picking one side or the other? The "why bother" argument against tonality, I think, takes its ultimate form when applied against a tonal/atonal division.

What I really think, though—that is, my feelings on this matter as they relate to music itself—is: What the atonal/noise/anti-tonal/whatevs crowd seems to insist on forgetting is that, like it or not, as socialized beings, we to a man all have a deeply ingrained and very powerful reaction to tonal relationships; the intervals, in succession and simultaneous, between different perceived pitch objects (can we say "notes"?), create an aesthetic reaction in a listener, to say nothing of dominant progressions or cadences. To ignore this fact, then, is to rather irresponsibly betray the devotion of the Cage crowd to an objective and total approach to sound. Put simply, to embrace music and sound in their wholest senses, as Cage exhorts us, and to most effectively and completely understand and create interactions between sound and human beings, we would be very very foolish to write off tonality of any sort.

I don't think this is "insisting" on tonal systems; I merely, in my pluralistic liberal fashion, see railing away lustily as just as short-sighted a tack as pretending that music begins and ends with Common Practice.
 
 
Char Aina
15:43 / 21.11.05
i may be wrong, but it sounds to me like you are unaware or glossing over the fact that the 12-tone equal tempered tuning system is not the only way to divide the range between octaves.
its been in place in the west for a few centuries and has been used by some of the greatest composers we have produced, sure.
it works really well for a lot of stuff, sure.

its not a natural realtionship described, though, but a best fit line through the points as they would sit on a graph.
its a choice, basically.

google the gamelan from java for an old instrument that follows a different way, or a guy called partch and the 43 step scale for more information on some of the modern alternatives. (partch's own stuff is interesting, but its his knowledge of the history of it thats really strong)
 
 
Crux Is This City's Protector.
23:48 / 21.11.05
Trust me, my man, I'm down with Partch, and gamelan, and every microtune you could name. Ben Johnston is one of my favorites, and I count Kyle Gann among my best teachers, and also among my friends. I don't assume the necessity of the 12-tone, equal-tempered system. I merely, as I said, think that it's just as ignorant a position to, willfully out of thoughtlessness, ignore the very factual fact that most of the Western world, at this point, has a very deep-seated socialized reaction to, and relationship with, the 12-tone system, and equal temperament in particular. I do not argue for its primacy; merely that (even if we're talking only in terms of historical precedent, and given that we're agreeing that there is not One True Tuning System, historical precedent actually carries a lot of weight) merely that its capacity for producing powerful aesthetic reactions and emotion should not, under any circumstances, be overstated.
 
 
Char Aina
00:15 / 22.11.05
fair enough.

i guess where im coming from is that while i dont doubt the precedent argument, i do wonder if our reactions to other harmonies could develop fairly easily.

playing a seventh sounded wrong to me when i was learning a particular bach piece on my bass; it sounded off key.
i was coming to it from a fairly pentatonic world of rock precedent, and so found it alien to make the jump as it was written.(to the point where i wondered if it was a misprint)

familiarity helps one with interpreting the 'feel' of the sound, but i dont know if it is anything other than conditioning.

there are lots of situations in which the conditioned response is not the only valid one, and where breaking the conditioning opens up a world of fun.

i think we probably agree, to be honest.

if you wanta simple and easily understood message, speak a language that everyone knows.
that shouldnt stop you using obscure words when appropriate, though.
 
 
Crux Is This City's Protector.
00:20 / 22.11.05
Yeah, I mean, that's what I've been saying this whole time. I don't understand why it's one or the other; I have been doing anything BUT saying that diatonic tonality is the only way we can or should go about things. I just think that often people start railing against conventional tonality or musicianship as a kneejerk reaction to having just discovered the vast worlds that lie outside, and while I agree 100% with the sentiment, "Why limit yourself to conventional music?" very, very often that immediately leads to, "Don't bother with conventional music." and that is just silly.
 
 
Char Aina
00:31 / 22.11.05
where do you stand on the 'is it natural' debate?
do you feel that the harmonies between the steps are natural relationships?

i feel that a fifth and an octave are for sure.
im less sure about the rest.
 
 
at the scarwash
01:58 / 23.11.05
I would never say that the musics and the tools developed by any of the world's tonal systems should be ignored or done away with. I do think that it is interesting, at least, and perhaps useful, to ask why it is that we find it important to begin with this as the cornerstone of musical instruction and indoctrination. Certainly it is a teaching method that has been fruitful for centuries, and for damn sure, it's a lot easier to train someone to play an instrument designed for a certain structure of tonality using the precepts of that tonality. I just wonder if, in a world where Cage's ideas have become such trusims that they are more or less cliches, can we teach/learn music from the position of a listener, ears without preconceived notions about what is and is not acceptable in music, rather than a rote-trained set of finger/brain responses that plunge one into the well-trodden labyrinth of what's gone before. That being said, I have no new approach to musical pedagogy. I just think it's something to consider.

As for toksik's question about the "naturalness" of equally-tempered intervals, I think that the just-intonation theorists have answered that pretty well. Most of us have grown up surrounded by musics that are based upon equal-tempered intervals. This is the music that some musical reactionaries consider to be the most naturally harmonious, the classical repetoire since the 17th century, or thereabouts. Going back to Pythagoras, and more recently, to Parch and the other 20th century explorers of just-intonation, we find that the mathematically derived series of intervals is quite different from the one that lies across a piano keyboard, and to the ears of some listeners, sounds more acoustically true or pure.

Also, to my ears, a lot of the greatest sounds in traditional musics come from the richness of microtonal swarms clustered around a tonal center. The richness of a mass choir only exists because the singers are slightly out of tune with one another. Listen to the shimmering sound of the sho in a traditional gagaku orchestra as the fixed-reed flutes sweep in and out of tune with it, or the transfixing sweet-spots of the swarming glissandi of one of Xenakis' orchestral works. Or just the sound of a good guitar player bending a note, hovering just shy of a perfect interval. I'm not trying to come to any conclusion with this, just saying that so much of tonal music is given life at the points where it deviates from perfect intervals, no matter what tonal system is being followed.
 
 
grant
16:29 / 23.11.05
I like bent notes because they sound like a human voice, and I tend to like dissonance because it reminds me of environmental sounds -- machinery, the roar of traffic, waterfalls or church bells.

I'm not familiar enough with formal tonal systems to really talk about how this feeling interfaces with that, but I do think in a way this stuff feels more "natural" than your even-tempered scale -- kind of like Carlsbad Caverns feels more natural than the Great Cathedral of Koeln.

Can anyone summarize the history of the octave for a newbie?
 
 
Crux Is This City's Protector.
02:32 / 24.11.05
Quick rundown (and I've been drinking.):

An octave is a 2:1 relationship between two pitches. If a pitch is exactly twice the frequency of another, it will sound like the same "note", an octave up.

Integer relations define the rest of the diatonic scale. Pythagoras figured them out; 2:3, 8:9, etc. Thus, integer-wise, a major third has a five-to-three relationship to its root pitch. However, there is a problem.

If you go up what is called the 'cycle of fifths', getting all your basic pitches in a scale my ascending a fifth from each one, you don't come back totally even to the pitch you started. That is, let's say you start with a middle C: 261.625565 Hz, by modern standards. Take the fifth of C, G, by going up a fifth. Note that down, go up again, and again. You'll fill in your whole scale. However, when you get to the end, all 11 pitches have been filled in, your ending C is NOT going to be the same as the one you started with. It's off by a small ratio, 531441:524288. That discrepancy is called the Pythagorean Comma.

Folks have tried a lot of tuning systems over the years, and the one use now is Equal Temperament. The basic notion of 12-ET, as it's known, is that it takes that small discrepancy above and distributes it evenly among every note in a scale, so the octaves line up. Thus every interval is very very slightly out of tune, but they're all EQUALLY out of tune; with an earlier system, such as Just Intonation, you could only tune to a specific key (or a set of a few modes), because anything outside of that key would sound REALLY out of tune. Equal Temperament, at the expense of overharmonic purity, makes pieces like Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier possible.

The 20th Century, as has been alluded to, brought with it a number of new and revived ideas of tuning systems. Among them are Partch's famous 43-tone scale, where he split a single octave into 43 separate pitches, all defined by various whole-number ratios (though he worked in many, many different tuning systems), in addition to revived Just Intonation systems, employed by La Monte Young and Ben Johnston among others. The general trend of composing or playing music in (often diatonic) systems that are not in Equal Temperament is known as microtuning.
 
 
grant
03:10 / 24.11.05
So it was Pythagoras and the Greeks who decided the next note after C was a C# (and not a quarter tone or some other weird interval)?
 
 
at the scarwash
19:40 / 25.11.05
well, not exactly. the western system of written musical notation came a little later, starting with rudimentary markings on the texts of liturgical chants. and as was explained above, the Pythagorean, ratio-based system of intervals meant that C# is a few microtones off of the justly derived interval up from C.
 
 
Crux Is This City's Protector.
19:53 / 25.11.05
I think what he was asking is whether it was the Pythagorean system which first gave rise to a 12-tone scale, and in that case the answer is yes. Those are the tones you get when you ascend the circle of fifths.
 
 
Char Aina
21:52 / 25.11.05
grant-
'pythagorean circle' or '(great)circle of fifths':



i found that googling for 'enharmonic' and thought it might be handy.
i was googling that because i wanted a nice concise explanation of how tones have been called different things throughout musical history.
enharmonic basically means that something sounds the same but is notated differently, as with C sharp and D flat.

while pythagoras devised the circle above, the actual descriptors were not solidified for many years.
a lot of western music notation was instrument specific until fairly recently, for example.

also probably of interest to you would be enharmonic diesis(sp?) which refers to the ratio innacuracy found in standard tuning.

in the opening post scarwash mentions just intonation and the idea that a piano would need retuned for keychanges. he's referring to the fact that the piano has been tuned to an average, rather than an absloute.
this average line means you can play them all slightly off rather than be way off for some and spot on for others.

have a google for diesis and i'm sure someone will be able to tell you the ralative values of the notes in a 'perfect' chord.
 
  
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