The Tonal System in Music

• This arose in European music in the 17th century.

• It’s more or less fully-formed by the time of the Baroque composers (Bach, Vivaldi etc).
• It’s the organizational system used by all European composers in the 18th and most of the 19th centuries (the “common
practice period”)
• It’s an organization system based on chords (the simultaneous sounding of multiple pitches).
• Roughly, the idea is that you have:
• A tonic chord, which is “home” (e.g. C major)
• A dominant chord, which “wants to return home” (e.g. G major)
• Various subdominant-type chords that represent straying away from home but not too far (e.g. D minor, E minor, F major and
A minor)
• The progression tonic→subdominant→dominant→tonic is what defines tonal music.
• Composers found more and more ingenious ways to vary this progression.
• It starts with modulation, which establishes a new, temporary tonic. Moving to a new tonic then finding our way back is a
fundamental idea that makes sonata-allegro form possible; this form dominates the common practice period.
• They also gradually added more chords: out-of-key chords that support longer progressions, richer “extended” chords, more
dissonant chords like the augmented triad and so on.
• Eventually, near the end of the 19th century, it seemed to many composers that the system was exhausted. While
innovations were still possible, they seemed like novelties rather than fresh, interesting ideas. Many felt it was time for
something new.
• One of those was Schoenberg’s invention: serialism. The fundamental idea was to break the habit of privileging one “tonic”
by designing a new approach in which all the notes are exactly equal.
• Here is a nice, non-technical undergraduate thesis on serial techniques if you want to read more:
https://digital.sandiego.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1016&context=honors_theses.
 Some Key Ideas
• Tradition opposed to academicism.
• Tradition becomes a resource we can reach back into and find ideas that have been lost.
• And also justification for “new” ideas – proof that the greats already used them, as in Schoenberg’s praise for J S Bach
for using all twelve tones (p.42).
• Pound and Eliot read deeply in older literature to find “new” forms and ideas that academic critics might
have criticised.
• A notion of “collective unconscious” is abroad
• Jung first proposed the term in 1916 but Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890) had already been hugely
influential.
• In a sense stories from ancient traditions also belong to ours because they (and we) all repeat the same
patterns.
• This strand of thought leads to a kind of universal art that has the same lasting power as, say, the Greek
myths.
• This also leads to serious and respectful engagements with non-Western traditions – for example, Pound’s reading of
Japanese poetry, Eliot’s of the Mahabarata or Olivier Messiaen’s interest in Indian music.
• Radical traditionalists such as Dante or (more dubiously) Shakespeare who virtually created a
poetic language – founders of their own traditions.
• So being a radical may look like saving the tradition from stagnation, and again can be justified by
precedent.
• All this leads to a rather weird relationship with the idea of “progress”.
“New Music”
• Schoenberg’s beef in this essay seems to be with the phrase or idea of “new music”
rather than any particular composer.
• His complaint is that newness in the arts can be a superficial matter of “style” rather than a more
profound “idea”, which he (Romantically) attaches to the composer’s divine genius.
• This may be a response to (here, nameless) critics who thought Schoenberg’s music remained to old-fashioned,
especially in its use of older forms and his preference for rather rigorous counterpoint.
• In fact, Pierre Boulez criticised him for exactly this, but much later (in the 1950s).
• There is a very clear (and very Germanic) sense that history progresses organically by a dialectical
process: each generation builds on, but also to an extent reverses, the achievements of the
previous one.
• So Bach overcame the Dutch school of composers (whoever they were) by developing dense and sophisticated
counterpoint; Mozart and Haydn “evolved” their own music by pushing counterpoint into the background and
emphasising melody; Beethoven brought back counterpoint and so on.
• But Beethoven doesn’t repeat Bach; the tradition develops.
• Schoenberg very clearly saw himself as a continuation of the tradition.
• He does take a swipe at “populist” music on the final page.
• But he admits this is an “authentic” voice for some composers.
• He was on good terms with composers like Poulenc who took a very different approach to him. I
think he respected their great craft, and perhaps saw them as belonging to different traditions.
• But there is always, lurking in the background, the spectre of German Music, which was clearly the
most important tradition of all…