From Classicism to Modernism

Western Musical Culture and the Metaphysics of Order

Brian K. Etter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781138736771
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351735070
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This title was first published in 2001. The last century has witnessed the ascendancy of the avant-garde in music. From Schoenberg to Boulez to Stockhausen, the avant-garde has defined the modern conception of musical creativity. Contemporary serious music demands the "new" in terms of style, form and ways of listening and hearing. Implicit in this approach is the rejection of the "old", from the baroque to the music of the later 19th-century symphonists. Paradoxically, however, it is this "old" repertoire which contiues to dominate concert programmes. An exploration of this dichotomy lies at the heart of this book. Drawing on a wealth of European philosophical and musical texts, the author examines the origins of the avant-garde and its relation to modernity in tandem with the history of the tonal tradition.

Part One
The Culture of Classicism

Chapter One
The Classical Understanding of Tonality

Tonality has traditionally been understood as the foundation of the music composed in the common practice period of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The term embraces everything which appears most distinctive – and to many, most appealing – in the musical style of the period: the prevalence of consonance, rootedness in a tonic key for each work through reliance on functional harmonies, and the integration of melodic or thematic materia! in different key levels. But tonality in this sense was more than a practice: it was a set of expectations. Above all, therefore, tonality was a normative system.

To seek the intellectual foundations of such a familiar style may seem superfluous. Yet whether the concept of tonality embraces all of the above characteristics, or only the rootedness in a tonic pitch, has become a serious debate. Thus what accounts for the phenomenon of tonality is by no means clear, because what constitutes the core concept is disputed. But the dispute over tonality today arises out of a deeper and longer controversy over its legitimacy. At issue is not just the nature of an historical style, but its claim to normativity. For why, indeed, should consonance, key, functional harmony, and melody have any claim to constitute a privileged style? For critics today, as for the avant-garde earlier in the twentieth century, this is the heart of the issue.

Whereas early theorists of the seventeenth century attempted to make the essential elements of the style dependent on the natural phenomenon of the overtone series, modern theorists of the twentieth century have largely rejected such a claim. At most, the need for a simple tonal unity is recognized, with a plurality of types of tonality; the specific kind of tonality fundamental to the common practice period becomes just one approach among many.¹ But if nature does not ground the details of musical style, then it follows that style is a cultural choice, an arbitrary constellation of parameters which might be chosen quite differently in another historical or social context.

The denial of naturalism, then, leads inevitably to the thesis of historicism, whereby tonality becomes simply one phase in the development of musical organization of sonic materials. This is Adorno's position: tonality was never something created out of natural acoustical facts. Rather, it was part of the attempt to emancipate human nature from physical nature, and thus also to accomplish 'the subjection of nature to human purposes'. As such, it belonged to 'mercantile society, whose dynamics stress totality and demand that the elements of tonality correspond to these dynamics on the most basic level.'² On this Marxist view – still important to the post-modernist critique – tonality was an entirely artificial construct arising out of the conditions of bourgeois society. But even without the questionable sociological premise, the sense that any particular tonal organization has a claim to privilege as a result of its intrinsic nature evaporates as a result of historicism.³ Indeed, it must become impossible to discuss music in terms of a concept of nature. With that, however, the ability to distinguish styles and tastes also becomes impossible: we are left with merely the undifferentiated sonic bath of artificially created sounds. This is to say, then, that how the nature of tonality is understood has everything to do with whether works composed in the style still have a claim on our attention, if not affection. Both the naturalist and the historicist theses appear weak, however, in failing to account for what seems most compelling about tonal music in the specific sense of the common practice period.

Naturalism and historicism re-examined

The weaknesses of both naturalism and historicism bear closer scrutiny. The naturalist thesis may be traced back to the sixteenth century, when Girolamo Fracastoro observed the sympathetic vibration of strings of equal length in the 1540s.⁴ Nearly a century later, Marin Mersenne discovered the sympathetic vibration of strings tuned at the octave and at the fifth.⁵ Finally, Joseph Sauveur concluded in 1701 that the resonance of a 'fundamental sound' included the intervals of the twelfth and major seventeenth.⁶ This was crucial for Jean-Philippe Rameau's explanation of consonance in his Génération harmonique of 1737: there, he argued that the overtone series confirmed the ratios of just intonation as natural phenomena arising within the single sound of a vibrating body.⁷ Moreover, this single sound contained within it the first five tones of the overtone series – a number he believed to be the limit of what could be heard within such a resonance (see Example 1.1). Hence, on his view, the natural pleasure taken in the major triad, or 'perfect chord', which had been the foundation of his earlier explanation of compositional practice in The Treatise on Harmony. Since Rameau's entire concept of key depended on the resolution of a chain of dissonances to a perfect cadence on the tonic, the problem of what actually required dissonance to resolve was critical.⁸ With this explanation of a natural need for dissonance to resolve to consonance, the foundations of the new style had at last a firm foundation. Neither simply force of habit nor long tradition of regarding the lowest ratios of string length as desirable was adequate; now the normativity of consonance had a physical justification. But with this solution came also a justification of tonal centredness in the tonic chord, and an explanation of why root movement by fifth was the strongest. The fundamental chord progression, of the dissonant dominant seventh to the consonant tonic, was fully justified (see Example 1.2).

Example 1.1 The overtone series

Example 1.2 Dissonance resolution in the fundamental chord progression

One question that may be raised is whether consonance is adequately defined by the first five tones of the overtone series: is it indeed the limit of what the ear can hear in the resonance of the fundamental? As a definition, it appears little less arbitrary than the older restriction of consonance to the 'simpler' ratios of string length, up to 6:5 as the minor third. Another problem is that Rameau does not fully account for the nature of tonality. In particular the minor triad, the other fundamental consonant chord, is not adequately explained. Rameau argued, mistakenly, that a resonating body also vibrated in modes slower than that of the fundamental sound; hence, the series of lower partials would generate the inverse of the major triad, namely, the minor triad.⁹ Hugo Riemann took up this notion at the end of the nineteenth century not only as the foundation for the minor mode, but of the chordal function built on the fourth scale degree as well.¹⁰ But the acoustical error on which this line of thought was based has served to discredit for most modern theorists the founding of any explanation of consonance on the natural phenomenon of the overtone series.

More seriously, perhaps, the naturalist explanation of consonance does not fully address the question of what creates the perception of key across large-scale musical forms. Since key level was already in the Baroque the foundation of musical structure, this is by no means a trivial problem. Rameau simply says that the leading tone creates the sense of key, and recommends that in a longer composition the composer modulate through a variety of keys, 'returning imperceptibly to those keys which are most closely related to the initial key, finishing there in such a way that it appears as if this key had never been left'.¹¹ In that case, however, one might wonder whether any sense of contrast is really gained by modulation or, alternatively, whether a unified feeling of key could extend across a longer work.

In the nineteenth century, the theorist responsible for contributing the practice of notating chords by Roman numerals, Gottfried Weber, was clearly bothered by this problem: he made it the central focus of his Theory of Musical Composition.

When our ear perceives a succession of tones and harmonies, it naturally endeavors to find amidst this multiplicity and variety an internal connection – a relationship to a common central point . . . . The ear everywhere longs to perceive some tone as the principal or central tone, some harmony as a principal harmony, around which the others revolve as accessories around their principal, to wit, around the predominant harmony.¹²

But he cautioned against an attempt to determine definitively how the ear perceives such tonal unity, giving only general laws. He argued a version of Ockham's Razor: the ear explains combinations of tones in the simplest possible way, and once it is accustomed to hearing a particular key as the primary one, does not change its perception of key without sufficient cause. Even so, however, he had to admit exceptions in the form of habits and reminiscences which might determine a completely different perception of key.¹³ Thus, Weber recognized the complexity of key feeling in a longer musical work. Indeed, his theory of harmony proves much more fluid than the standard textbook treatment of the classical harmonic language today.

As a corollary, the final element of dissatisfaction with the naturalist theory of tonality must be the almost exclusive concentration on harmony, when it is melody that is the usually predominant object of perceptual attention in tonal music. For Rameau, harmony was the foundation of melody, so that to know the principles governing the harmonic language was to enable the composer to write any melody he chose; the really hard part was to control the harmonic progressions.¹⁴ Among Baroque composer-theorists, Johann Mattheson emphasized melody much more than others. In his Complete Capellmeister of 1739, he listed the requirements of a good melody: 'facility' or naturalness, 'clarity' or simplicity of expression, 'flow' without interruptions, 'charm' from generally stepwise motion, and variety in the choice of intervals. Subsequent writers, notably Joseph Riepel and Heinrich Koch in the second half of the eighteenth century, also emphasized melody, especially its role in articulating musical structure.¹⁵ But if the latter two reflect the growing concern with melody typical of the Classical period, it is remarkable that few nineteenthcentury theorists continued the interest in melody. Melody was a matter for the composer's personal inspiration, guided by his command of the harmonic language. To the extent, however, that melodic practice was interwoven in practice and perception of tonality, this appears to reduce melody to a strictly subservient role. A naturalist explanation of tonality, then, appears to be of only limited value in accounting for the supremely melodic musical style founded in tonal harmony.

The historicist thesis, however, appears to have the merit of accounting for the development of both musical style and the theoretical justification in one comprehensive system. The composers who have most significantly affected the development of modernist styles in the twentieth century have been proponents of historicism as their justification. Arnold Schoenberg, most famously, argued that tonality had undergone a substantial change over the course of the nineteenth century, going from the case of one tone clearly dominating the succession of chords to a case of 'extended tonality', in which the relation of all the chords to a single tonic became increasingly dubious. From Richard Wagner's chromatic harmonies to Debussy's use of sonorities without chordal function was a short step in his eyes; but as a consequence the commanding power of tonality was gone forever. Moreover, the psychological appeal and sensory comprehensibility of consonance were no longer essential due to the historical developments of musical style: dissonance had become emancipated from the normativity of consonance because of the familiarity of its use.¹⁶ Hence the thesis of historicism led to the corollary of historical evolution from tonality to atonality, and from consonance to dissonance as a norm.

For Schoenberg's contemporaries, the implications of historicism extended even to the progressive use of new tonal materials. Thus, Ferruccio Busoni described the new scales he proposed, resulting in the 'unity of all keys' as a 'kaleidoscopic blending and interchanging of twelve semitones', erasing the difference between major and minor tonalities; but the next step would be the division of the octave into more than twelve semitones.¹⁷ Schoenberg's student, Anton Webern, agreed: since the overtone series was infinite, '[e]ver subtler differentiations can be imagined, and from this point of view there's nothing against attempts at quarter-tone music and the like ...'.¹⁸ Thus the historical evolution from the church modes to the system of major/minor tonality was yielding to the emergence of an era of chromaticism and perhaps even finer intervals. But this is less a theory of tonality than a justification for other systems altogether.

Stravinsky, too, agreed that tonality had passed away, at least in the classic sense of the term. Although he argued for a more clearly perceptible means of organizing musical sonorities than Schoenberg, he also took tonality to be a limiting case of such organization, possessing 'no absolute value.'¹⁹ Thus, compositional practice in the twentieth century, long dominated by the twin examples of Schoenberg and Stravinsky, has distanced itself from a tonality regarded now as outmoded and limited. But the choice of style then either becomes a product of historical necessity, as Schoenberg argued, eliminating the composer's element of choice, or it becomes an arbitrary choice. In Stravinsky's case, the arbitrariness reveals itself in his passage through three distinct styles – the primitive, the neo-classical and the serial – in the search for an authentic voice. In both the primitive and neo-classical phases, however, the conflicting sonorities of polytonality imply an essential ambiguity.

Not s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Music Examples
• Preface
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Part 1: The Culture of Classicism
• Part 2: The Culture of Modernism
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index