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 example, when a tensive structure (e.g., tritone) opens/dilates outward or condenses/collapses/contracts inward.

Motive

When tonality is abandoned so also abandoned is the order that facilitates the vertical and horizontal architecture of music: melody (horizontal; sequential); and harmony (vertical; coincidental).

1. Tonality might be considered as a natural system or logic of complementary relationships whereby the natural ordering of tones occurs in a manner that yields balance between consonance and dissonance.
2. Musical skill is the ability to precisely compose according to the logic of those complementary relationships. And, lest anyone balk at the use of the terms consonance and dissonance, one merely need point out the primacy of the ordering of pitches in the harmonic series. In the first stages of the series, the clearly audible stage, the intervals between pitches are wider (Perfect Octave; Perfect Fifth; Perfect Fourth; Major Third; minor third; minor third). The further up the series based on a fundamental (tonic), the intervals become tighter (Major 2nd, minor second, etc).
3. Tonality is like gravity: the listener disposed to harmony is pulled toward and into a fundamental or tonic, toward unity, toward resolution. Music pulls the listener between the pitches; tangles the observer in the intervals.
4. The emergence of tonality parallels the awareness of the juxtaposition of tones to create balance between tension and resolution. Wider related intervals permit the insertion of one's attention into a given sonority. There is no room for (the listener's) participation in a composition that is haphazard and/or anarchic.
5. Sensitivity to tonality (...the natural hierarchy of tones...) enables the composer to intuitively (spontaneously) or logically (predictively) organize tones in a way that conforms to the natural architecture of the harmonic series (of pitches oriented to or prioritized by a fundamental/tonic).

It is hardly coincidental that in an age of anarchy that the order or balance which tonality offers is systematically undermined because order, for one, is a threat to those who, demanding freedom from the "slavery of tonality" (and the natural order it represents), (ironically) are themselves slaves to license (i.e., licentiousness). Consequently, in place of tonality a myriad of arbitrary principles are applied to sound(s) in an attempt to lend credibility to those same arbitrary principles that are as foreign to music as footings made of plastic are to the foundation and construction of a building. Such plastic "music" is fit fashion for an emperor who was dressed by two con men whose deception is exposed by a child lacking the disordered intellect and will that prop up pretense.

A Grammar of Order versus Anti-grammar

Musical composition, then, is or should be the configuring of tones to the natural order. Ordering tones according to algorithms other than the harmonic series has merit insofar as any ordering concept that conveys meaning in a coherent manner has (some) merit, but those compositional processes that avoid the logic of tonality may be better grouped under the term soundcraft.

Composers decided to serialise time values, unpitched sounds and timbres, hoping thereby to exert total control over everything. Interestingly enough this development went hand in hand with the emergence of aleatoric scores, in which instrumentalists are handed bundles of notes that they could choose to assemble in any order, or scores that ask for indeterminate sounds. Randomisation had the same effect as serialisation, which was to deprive musical elements of their intrinsic ways of relating to each other. 

Sir Roger Scruton, The Music of the Future

Music and musical merit is or should be defined by the degree to which a composition is configured to the architecture of the natural order. I.e., tonality.

Don't be sharp; don't be flat; just be natural.

One would think that in a world where people increasingly (and often zealously) seek to be configured to nature, or their "progressive" idea of nature, the natural order and natural living, listeners (in search of authenticity) would reject plastic (disposable) compositions possessing little or no lasting flavour (artistic merit) nor nutrition, and instead favour a healthy diet of natural music. When people abandon commonsense and just intuition, disordered fixations infiltrate people's thinking and addictions to vile objects monopolize their choices.

The Descent Into Unresolved (Cultural) Dissonance

The tendency to attempt to redefine reality in our own image is clearly manifest in, for example, contemporary attempts to usurp and redefine social ritual(s) previously configured to the natural law. The composition of music that configures sounds according to natural principles is no longer a universal avenue along which many composers travel to organize their (ordered) intentions. Disordered intentions born of a disordered heart yield disordered "music".

The consequences of rejecting the vocation of "natural music", and the rejection of the natural living and supernatural themes that music should represent, but are most often avoided in both popular music and art music, include a descent into a preoccupation with trivial politics and trivial human relationships to the point of normalizing entitlement to engage in base self gratification, normalizing dangerous behaviour and idolizing sexualized violence. A reasonable person could be forgiven for vomiting profusely whilst listening to any number of recent pop, rap and other trashy ditties.

We live in an age when fiction (born of a demand for acceptance of non-art produced by clever but illiterate manufacturers of non-art) has been granted a status equal to that of reality. To challenge the new reality is to thrust one's hand into a hornets' nest of rabid artists eager to protect the hokum they deem to be above criticism. Rather than engage and defend their creations, they choose to ridicule those who reject the marketing of bunkum as art.

Ritual, Reclamation, Restoration, Recapitulation

Lesser deities habitually argue that the construction of compositions according to tonality is an arbitrary or dated ideal. However, those challenges fail to appreciate the multi-millennial history of tonal music rooted in the human experience and, importantly, the ongoing creation of contemporary virtuosic tonal works that prove tonality is far from exhausted as a principle for creating works of art.

• Tonality has shaped the psychological orientation of societies. Psychological, as in the individual and collective personality of the human race.
• As human experience is continually shaped by a participation in the theologically orthodox experience of and cooperation with the Holy Trinity, music created to celebrate the experience and participation in the life offered by the God of revelation also affirms that tonal music is a necessary affirmation of the order designed by God for our santification and divinization.

The origins of music are in ritual encounter. That is, in man's eagerness to approach and welcome the divine through means that are true and good and beautiful. Man's fascination and dedication to producing toned-formulas that fix themselves in the memory and become vehicles for sacred texts is a challenge to both the secularist and liberal religious mentality which abhors anything that, to the mind of the progressive ideologue at least, situates traditional religious experience (and the music that celebrates it) at the centre of liturgical experience.

Given the weight of history, then, which is to say the vast history of human experience, true music, i.e., tonal music, is indigenous to humanity. Conversely, much of the 20th Century repertoire, characterized by a pseudo-grammar that denies humanness and the personalization of musical experience, is an attempt to colonize hearts and minds in a most brutal manner, producing brutes and brutalism in the process. So-called progressives should consider themselves allies with tradition-minded Catholics in the cause for the decolonization of music. That is, in the cause to free music from attempts to rob art of its indigenous tonalist character. Ironically, progressives are guilty of a contemporary destructive colonialism for attempting to rob the Church of her artistic identity and her spiritual language. Progressives are collaborators with the secular machine that turns music into a cheap commodity and liturgy into a mirror of socialist realist ideology, which stunts the imagination and locks worshipers behind an iron curtain as dangerous to to the human spirit as Marxism.

As many in both the Church and secular society have embraced the zombie of atheistic secularism, be it socialism or progressivism or any cousin thereof, and have attempted to clothe themselves in elaborate though cheap substitutes for music, minds inclined to harmony and melody stubbornly cling to tonality.

Coda

But what say you about non-pitched percussion instruments? Percussion instruments such as the snare or bass drum are not non-pitched. Drum skins are tightened (or loosened) - tuned - so as to resonate in an efficient, dynamic and rhythmic manner to compliment the rhythmic architecture and articulation or diction and dynamic range of a composition. Drums properly tuned are as integral to the harmony, intonation and articulation of a composition as properly tuned strings are to the intonation of a pitch that is part a given sonority.

Form. Form naturally arises as pitches and intervals play against each other (dissonance, instability) and resolve (consonance, stability). Intervals that leave room or space or adhere to the harmonic series associated with a precedent (key) might be termed consonant. Intervals that compress the space between each other that obscure the key might be termed dissonant. Dissonance is a relationship in search of resolution. Consonance is stability. Without a balance between consonance and dissonance a composition becomes static or brittle, and a contradiction in terms.

Destructions

Have "composers" of modern "music" become so entangled in the 20th Century post-world war adolescent angst that they cannot appreciate melody? It would seem so.

There is little place in the temple for a composition born of a philosophy (or pseudo-philosophy) that denies there is something beyond itself to which it might refer were it ordered to principles that enable pitches (woven into sentences) to bear the weight of the divine to a degree that in the soul of the worshiper those phrases become windows into eternity, avenues created by creators created in the image of the Creator Himself.

From a more naturalistic perspective, if tonality enables composers to reach the summit of musical composition, i.e., music of the highest artistic merit, then atonality is the sewer into which anarchy is flushed.

Recapitulation

To return to the initial question: have many or most composers of modern music reduced themselves to producers of mere soundcraft? It would seem so.

Postlude

https://www.roger-scruton.com/lectures-speeches/europe/379-the-music-of-the-future-donaueschingen-oct-16

Sir Roger Scruton

4. ... (T)he replacement of tones by sounds, and musical by acoustical hearing. Varèse, Pierre Schaeffer and their immediate successors awoke composers and audiences to the many new sounds, some of them produced electronically, that could enter the space of music without destroying its intrinsic order. These experiments are not what I have in mind when referring to the replacement of tones by sounds and musical by acoustical hearing. I am thinking of a more general transition, from Tonkunst to Klangkunst, to use the German expressions – a transition of deep philosophical significance, between two ways of hearing, and two responses to what is heard.

[...]

The intrusion of acoustical ways of thinking into the practice and teaching of music is something we owe to Boulez and Stockhausen, and to the educational practices that they established. In Stockhausen sounds from everyday life are accorded exactly the same value as sounds within music – they are, as it were, invited in from the surrounding world, as in the work Momente, in which all kinds of sounds and speech-forms are brought together in a pot-pourri of fragments. As Stockhausen himself says, this work has no real beginning and no end: like all his works it starts without beginning and finishes without ending. For it lacks those elements of musical grammar that make beginnings and endings perceivable. It starts nowhere and stays at nowhere until ending nowhere. The same is true of Boulez’s Pli selon pli, in which the exotic instrumentation and serial organisation do not conceal the fact that no moment in this work has any intrinsic connection to the moment that comes next. The experience of ‘next’, and the inevitability of the next, has been chased away. In a concert devoted to music of this kind the audience can know that the piece has ended only because the performers are putting down their instruments.