NEW REDBUD LEAF (Cercis canadensis) | 100 MINIATURES (44) WHY A-TONALITY ISN'T POSSIBLE

from 100 MINIATURES—
WHY A-TONALITY ISN'T POSSIBLE . . .

We shape the world and the world shapes us.

In Music, to be confused about tonality is to be
confused about everything.

(44) What we think of as tonality in Music is perhaps
nothing more than a confused concept about
how sounds are centered in Space. Like a tree which
reaches from root to crown, suspended between earth
and open sky, sounds move to naturally center them-
selves in a dynamic web of relationships.

Implied in this is that what has been called a-tonal
music simply cannot or does not exist. At the same
time, it must be said that much music has indeed
been written that lacks strong, clear, articulate centers.

Trying to find one’s way in such music is much like
the exasperating experience of trying to navigate on
foot through prototypically featureless urban landscapes.

Who does not know this feeling, when offered no
center, of being lost before the very beginning?

COMMENTARY ON MINIATURE (44)

The idea that a-tonality is not possible is hard to
grasp, especially for musicians, starting about 1913 onwards,
who have been conditioned to think this way. This does
not mean I wish to return to pre-1913 thinking, or
to the dogmatic, dry and rigid way of thinking of the great
harmonic past of Western classical music, as represented by,
say, Walter Piston. Instead, I suggest that it is vastly more
powerful to think not at all in terms of tonality, but rather in
terms of sound. So we begin with natural sound. The whole
of it, consonants and vowels, the noise of a drum, and the
simple centered sound of a flute or soprano. And then, we
add the essential concept of movement. Then a cyclical
movement of simple to complex and back again, as in
textural terms embodied beautifully in a Bach cantata,
going from the unison simplicity of hymn, to the baroque
complexity of the contrapuntal writing of a fugue. Or to
see how thinking in centers works, the whole of Varèse,
or Stravinsky, or Ives can be easily understood in this
movement of simple to complex, with the complex sound
being generated with composites, or centers within centers
within centers. It is this sense of centered movement back
and forth from simple to complex that we quite rightly loose in,
for example, much of Schönberg after 1913. This has taken
music in the West down a radically wrong path, in my view.
The wrong path is not the music itself. That will I think pass
and be soon forgotten. The wrong path is the way of thinking
about sound and pitch which lingers on, and shapes and
conditions in a tacit way our thought and perception. (For
instance, if any one tells you, as I've heard as a conductor
many times, that one must be cursed, or blessed—depending
on your point of view—with so-called perfect pitch in order to
sing a particular music, I would say that is absolute rubbish.
Rubbish, in the sense that if that were the case, it is in my view
a sure and certain sign that there's something wrong with the
music. Quite simply, that the music lacks, in the new descriptive
language outlined here, not so much tonality, but clear centers.)

One additional new concept we need in order to understand
this problem is what I call complicatedness, in contrast to
complexity. Complicatedness is unnecessary difficulty.
Unnecessary difficulty, up to this day, has a strangle hold on
the Arts and Western culture generally, and new music specifically.
It is everywhere, not just in Schönberg, but also the frequently
over-notated scores of Ligeti and Xenakis, or the mechanical
reaction to complicatedness of mindless minimalism, or the
lack of clarity and resonant blending of the pitches in Elliott Carter,
to the almost complete fragmentation of many composers from
the intensely somatic experiences of performance and the
richness of how sounds mix together in living acoustic space.

Simple to complex and back. A cyclical movement. We use
then the same framework to think about movement in time, that is,
rhythm. Waves of changing density. Measured by the breath.
Regular to irregular and back. Simple measure to composite,
multiple, complex polyphonic measures and tempo modulations.
Discrete to continuous. Constant to constantly changing. Simple
to complex and back..

In closing here, it is interesting to note that the unnecessary
difficulty of complicatedness—again, in contrast to complexity,
which is natural, is diversity and richness, and is always good
as long as it is balanced by simplicity—has become a kind
of cult in new music. It is, I think, a kind of final-stage hyper-
extension of our obsession in the West with
notation and number and
measure generally.

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