Stories of Tonality in the Age of François-Joseph Fétis

Thomas Christensen

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780226627083
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Stories of Tonality in the Age of François-Joseph Fétis explores the concept of musical tonality through the writings of the Belgian musicologist François-Joseph Fétis (1784–1867), who was singularly responsible for theorizing and popularizing the term in the nineteenth century. Thomas Christensen weaves a rich story in which tonality emerges as a theoretical construct born of anxiety and alterity for Europeans during this time as they learned more about "other" musics and alternative tonal systems. Tonality became a central vortex in which French musicians thought—and argued—about a variety of musical repertoires, be they contemporary European musics of the stage, concert hall, or church, folk songs from the provinces, microtonal scale systems of Arabic and Indian music, or the medieval and Renaissance music whose notational traces were just beginning to be deciphered by scholars. Fétis's influential writings offer insight into how tonality ingrained itself within nineteenth-century music discourse, and why it has continued to resonate with uncanny prescience throughout the musical upheavals of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Chapter One

Tonal Imaginations

The excitement was palpable. In the fashionable concert salon of Herz just off the rue de la Victoire, an audience of the elite of Parisian musical society comprising some seven hundred spectators gathered on a cold, overcast winter afternoon in 1844—February 18, at 2:00 p.m., to be precise. The leading music critics and journalists had taken the front seats. But there were also large numbers of faculty and students from the Conservatoire to be seen in the audience as well as members of the Institut and Académie. Scattered in the rear rows were a smattering of Jesuit and Benedictine monks, conspicuous in their black cassocks among the well-dressed intelligentsia. A number of well-known musicians and salon artists could also be spotted in the room. Even Franz Liszt, it was whispered, had snuck in through a back door to take a seat.

And what kind of concert brought this large, motley group together? What famous musician had they come to see perform on that cold afternoon? Why, it was no concert at all. Instead, they had all gathered to hear a lecture—a lecture, of all things, on the history and theory of harmony. One might ask why this erudite topic could have been of so much interest to so many. But then again, no ordinary lecturer was speaking that afternoon. For they had all come to hear François-Joseph Fétis (1784–1871), the famed Belgian musicologist who had long gained a formidable reputation in Paris as a learned historian and theorist of music, conservatory professor, composer, critic, conductor, biographer, and indefatigable essayist.

Fétis knew how to pack the hall. In a series of promotional notices in the Revue et gazette musicale, he promised that this cours gratuit would be no ordinary recitation of technical theory or dry historical facts.1 Rather, Fétis promised something far more profound, far more astonishing “for the use of all artists and amateurs of music.” He would disclose to his listeners nothing less than the single universal principle of music, one that could explain the complete nature and history of music, sweeping away in one stroke the rubbish of erroneous theory that had accumulated over time. It was a principle that would explain the affective power of music, why it was that certain kinds of music could move us so deeply (and other kinds could not); it was also a principle that could be seen to have guided the development of music from its earliest ages and one that could also explain the diversities of music we can hear among differing cultures and peoples. Indeed, so powerful was this principle that it even promised to predict the next stages into which music would develop.

And what was this encompassing principle, this universal law, this all-powerful creative force? It was none other than that of tonalité. In the epic story Fétis related to his audience, “tonality” assumed the Promethean role as the guiding loadstar of musical development in all its historical and theoretical facets. It is this principle that was the subject of his four lectures during those two weeks—and we might also say, in most of the many writings he produced over his rich and productive eighty-seven years of life.2 Rarely before had any musicologist proposed a theory of music that was so grandiose in its scope, so audacious in its claims, so self-confident in its predictive power.3 Could Fétis possibly meet the great burden he placed on this one idea?

CHORON AND THE CONCEPT OF TONALITÉ

But first things first. Fétis, we should note, did not coin the locution tonalité. That honor seems to belong to his former mentor and friend, Alexandre-Étienne Choron (1771–1834).4 Although trained as a mathematician, Choron harbored a lifelong passion for music, particularly the sacred Italian choral repertoire of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As a youth, he read widely in the fields of music history and theory. Subsequent study with the Abbé Bonesi exposed him to the Italian partimento pedagogy of Francesco Durante and Nicola Sala. These studies eventually led him in 1804 to coauthor (along with Vincenzo Fiocchi) the Principes d’accompagnement des écoles d’Italie and four years later a much expanded, multivolume treatise, the Principes de composition des écoles d’Italie. While a good deal of this latter work consists of harmonic and counterpoint pedagogy drawn from Sala, Friedrich Wilhelm Marpurg, Padre Martini, and Galeazzo Sabbatini, it is also noteworthy as one of the greatest repositories of printed Italian Renaissance polyphony hitherto gathered within a single luxurious publication.

During this period, Choron also published a “summary” of the history of music, one part of which consisted of a “Historical Dictionary” of the most eminent “musicians, artists and amateurs, dead or alive” that he coauthored with François Fayolle.5 While much of his sommaire was drawn from earlier publications by Burney, Hawkins, and Forkel, there was also much new, as we will shortly see. Choron’s history was the first serious attempt by a French scholar to write a history of music in which changing tonal systems were seen as integral to the development of music.

Choron was an ardent advocate for the reform of church music, which was, he repeatedly lamented, in desperate shape. He was particularly alarmed about Gregorian chant, which was virtually unrecognizable in its current, distressing state.6 In order to understand where recent practice had gone astray, he began to study older treatises and manuscripts of medieval chant. In 1811, he accepted appointment as the Director of Music of Religious Ceremonies by Napoléon, one charge of which was to help revive the practice of chant in French churches.7

One final chapter in Choron’s busy career should be noted. After a short and unhappy stint as régisseur-général of the opera house (officially the Académie royale de musique), Choron founded in 1820 a choral school for young singers through which he could devote himself to the study and performance of his beloved Italian repertory of early vocal music. Granted support by the recently crowned Bourbon king, Louis XVIII, Choron’s school was renamed the Institution royale de musique classique et religieuse in 1825. As part of his charge, Choron directed a series of musical performances (or “exercises”) with his singers in which the classical sacred works of Italian polyphony could be heard in public.8 While the Institution collapsed shortly after the 1830 revolution, during the Restoration it played a major role in bringing to the public’s attention a range of early choral music and setting a pattern of historical music concerts that would be emulated by Fétis. (Choron’s school was resurrected, incidentally, at midcentury by Louis Niedermeyer, and it became one of the most influential schools of sacred music in the second half of the nineteenth century. We’ll hear more about the École Niedermeyer in the next chapter.) For now, though, it suffices to note that Choron’s musical activities in the first three decades of the century were dominated by his study, teaching, editing, and performance of early music.

Based on his deep immersion in historical sacred chant and Renaissance polyphony, Choron soon began to sense how different the tonal language of this early music was from that of contemporary music, and he attempted to describe these differences more concretely.9 The older style of music is most clearly to be heard in the ecclesiastical modes of the early church, modes that he thought were rooted in the music and theory of the ancient Greeks. Choron called this “tonalité antique.” It differed from the “tonalité moderne” or “tonalité vulgaire” of the present day, which relies on a system of keys and harmonies that was unknown within the earlier tonal system.10

Choron realized that one of the most important features of modern tonality was its use of the leading tone (note sensible) combined with the fourth scale degree. The resulting tritone or diminished fifth helped to define the tonic center of each key and was what gave the dominant seventh chord its unique key-defining quality. “The notes of the tritone,” Choron wrote, “seem in effect to summon [appeller] the notes toward which they tend to resolve. This is why they are called ‘appellative’ notes.”11 But it was quite the opposite in the ancient tonality, where no such appellative urges were registered. This was hardly surprising given that the interval of a tritone was strictly proscribed by theorists of the time.

Choron also thought he knew where the historical boundary lay between these two systems. It was at the end of the sixteenth century, when “modern tonality was beginning to be sensed most strongly and to exercise its influence in composition.”12 Just as Fétis eventually would, Choron credited Monteverdi “to whom of all the great masters . . . modern tonality and harmony owe their greatest debt” with this discovery.13 But if Monteverdi was the instigator of this new tonality, it was the great Neapolitan maestro Francesco Durante who, more than a century later, was the one to finally perfect modern tonality in the form we know it today.14

These insights helped Choron realize what the challenge was in any restoration of chant. Chant practice had been almost completely corrupted over the centuries by the encroachment of modern tonality. Specifically, it was the mixture of modern major and minor scales (modes modernes) with the scales of the ecclesiastical modes (modes primordiaux) by contemporary church musicians that had caused chant to degenerate to such a lamentable state. Each constituted a differing system that needed to be kept separate.

But there was more. Choron suggested that other people outside of Europe possessed their own “musical idioms or languages” based on varying scalar systems.

One can imagine the possibility of a great number of different modes by which one could form various systems. Each of these systems of modes will essentially constitute those idioms or languages of music that belong to different races of men. Thus, the peoples of the Levant seem to have a modality completely different from ours that . . . is not well understood to this day. We have shown, or at least indicated, what the tonality of the Greeks consisted of and that from it was derived ecclesiastical tonality. As for our [tonality], it contains only two modes.15

It was a remarkable insight that would greatly inspire Fétis. Each race of people might have their own system of modes or scales, their own special tonalité.16

Choron’s concept of tonality (one could not justify calling it a theory yet) remained undeveloped in his publications. Still, it was suggestive enough that the term was quickly picked up by a number of subsequent French theorists through the end of the Restoration, including Castil-Blaze (1820), Gréogoire Orloff (1822), Philippe Geslin (1825), Henri Berton (1829), and Daniel Jelensperger (1830), all who used it to describe elements of the modern major and minor scale system in their practical treatises of harmony.17 But it was Fétis who seemed to grasp most clearly the potential of this idea for an ambitious reconceptualization of music history.

Fétis would have first gotten to know Choron’s writings and perhaps the man himself soon after he left his native city of Mons (in present-day Belgium) for Paris, where our seventeen-year-old student enrolled in the newly reconstituted Conservatoire in 1800 (August 31 to be precise, the ninth day of Brumaire in year IX). In any case, at some point Fétis and Choron became close friends and confidants, a friendship that they would maintain until Choron’s passing in 1834.18

Yet Choron’s own contribution to Fétis’s project was more substantial than even this cursory overview suggests. For one thing, much in Fétis’s own pedagogy of harmony can be directly traced to Choron’s own, earlier formulations. (We will briefly look at some of these filiations later in this chapter, and in more depth in chapter 6.) But there is even more to this story, for it turns out that there are a substantial number of lengthy manuscripts in Choron’s hand in the Bibliothèque nationale that were never published but show a remarkable development of his theoretical ideas of tonalité through the 1820s. The German musicologist Nathalie Meidhof has recently published a study of these texts and found that Choron seemed to be sketching out a fuller theoretical and historical theory of tonality that anticipates in many striking ways many of the notions that we would later attribute to Fétis. For example, Choron seemed particularly focused on refining the concept of appellative tones, even speaking of the tritone as an “appellative consonance,” as Fétis soon would.19 He also continued to study ancient Greek music theory in an attempt to distinguish a tonalité antique and its difference from—and eventual evolution into—a tonalité ecclésiastique (Meidhof, 249). Meidhof sees these manuscripts as the “missing link” between Choron’s earlier and somewhat cryptic pronouncements about tonality and Fétis’s mature theory of tonality as he began to develop it in the 1830s (246). She plausibly hypothesizes that the subject of tonalité must have been a regular topic of conversation between the two men during this time. She concludes from this that the paternity for the concept of tonality should be shared between Choron and Fétis as the result of their hitherto unrecorded “collaboration” (260).

There is much to be said for Meidhof’s supposition. In a fulsome entry on Choron that Fétis published in 1837 in the third volume of his ambitious biographical dictionary, Fétis freely admitted that he had read many of Choron’s unpublished writings that Choron had showed him. Fétis does not tell us exactly what was in these writings except to say that they “are full of new ideas and profound principles” and “introduce many new ideas in the theory of [music]” such that their publication would no doubt “place Choron among the ranks of the most distinguished men in the literature and history of music” (BU¹, 3:134). Alas, Fétis continues, Choron’s own energy and confidence in his ideas flagged. Despite Fétis’s continual encouragement to develop and publish them, Choron left his manuscript texts in a box, never to be completed.

Meidhof suggests one plausible reason Choron may have felt uninspired to refine and publish his work. Perhaps he recognized in his younger colleague a more energetic and capable music theorist who could do a better job of it himself (Meidhof, 260). But it also might be that in the course of their conversations, Fétis was forming some of his own ideas that went far beyond what his esteemed mentor might have been thinking. As we will see, when Fétis finally started to publish his own thoughts regarding tonality, the concept would take on a wholly new dimension. But even then, it would take some time to work out its full implications.

FÉTIS AND THE METAPHYSICS OF TONALITY

It is easy for us to see in retrospect why Fétis would have been initially so drawn to Choron’s concept of tonalité. And here some background will be helpful. From his earliest memories as a child, Fétis claimed to have been drawn to music, a subject for which he showed unusual talent.20 He began taking organ lessons from his father (who was also a professional musician) while also making some efforts at composition. As a conservatory student i...