Toward Music: a rhapsody on tonality.
Prelude Have many or most composers of modern music reduced themselves to producers of mere soundcraft? Is the harmonic series the DNA of tonality (and therefore of music)? The compositional processes or techniques adopted by many contemporary composers of "art music" or music of the academy frequently avoid tonality, a family of relationships configured to and by the harmonic series . Tonality is the system of relationships configured to a tonic, a fundamental tone around which pitches function in a hierarchy of relationships. Function or proximity within that hierarchy enables a highly flexible axial or concentric expansion or compression of those relationships, what Sir Roger Scruton refers to as "intrinsic ways of (musical elements) relating to each other". Expansions can be rapid or extended, micral (contrapuntal) or macral (formal). The compressions can be equally rapid (dissonant/tensive) or extended (cadential). Tension is released, for...