Analyzing Harmonic Polarities

A Tonal Narrative Approach

Stephen Whale

• Publisher: Jenny Stanford Publishing
• Year: 2026
• Print ISBN:
  9789815129984
• eBook ISBN:
  9781040867617
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Classical Music

Analyzing the harmony and form of musical compositions remains a valuable tool for students of music, performers, composers, and musicologists. Yet many traditional approaches tend to focus on how complex features can be reduced into simpler categories and questions of unity and coherence. This book advocates an alternative tonal narrative approach, which uses a framework of polarities in dynamic interaction and interdependence to elucidate the life forces animating tonal compositions. Drawing on the writings of Arnold Schoenberg, Donald Francis Tovey, Charles Rosen, and others, the approach identifies three sets of polarities—centrifugal/centripetal, sharp/flat, and spatial/temporal—that interact in works by composers such as Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert. The approach suggests the methods by which the reader may delve into these polarities and thereby deeper into the meaning of masterworks. It proposes several tonal narrative functions, including intensifications to culminations and counterbalancing leading to completeness of harmonic space, which aim at helping the interpreter perceive the overall shape and narrative dynamics of a work.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Establishing the Polarities
• Chapter 2 Degrees of Spatial-Centrifugal Force and the Tonal Spectrum
• Chapter 3 An Energetics Perspective and the Temporal Aspect of Centripetal/Centrifugal Forces
• Chapter 4 Tonal Narrative Functions: Intensification Leading to Culminations; Counterbalancing Leading to Completeness
• Chapter 5 Alternating CP/CF Stages and Expanding Trajectories in Piano Sonatas by Mozart and Beethoven
• Chapter 6 Centripetal/Centrifugal Trajectories, Counterbalancing, Completeness, and Hermeneutic Polarities in Schubert’s D. 894/i
• Conclusion
• Glossary of Terms and Abbreviations
• Bibliography
• Index