Tonality:A Conflict of Forces

Patricia Carpenter

As a rule, the articulation of a perceptual image comes about rapidly and below the level of consiousness. We open our eyes and find the world already given. Only special circumstances make us realize that it takes an intricate process to form an image. When the stimulus situation is complex, unclear, or ambiguous, we consciously struggle for a stable organization, one that defines each part and each relation and so establishes a state of finality.—Rudolf Arnheim, New Essays in the Psychology of Art

Consider tonality. To define it, as Tovey observed, is as difficult as to describe the taste of a peach.1

These two—concept and phenomenon—are the two sides of all experience, constituted, as it is, by a dialectic between subject and object. We may consider a tonal theory in regard to practice or composition, or to a single piece of music or the history of musical works.2 Concerned with the adequacy of concept to phenomenon, we might investigate the phenomena, tonal musical works; for example:

To extract historically relevant criteria from theories that present themselves simply as universal musical

systems, it is necessary first to narrow the range of their validity.3

1 James C. Kidd begins an essay on different ''senses" of tonality with Tovey's "wonderful choice of simile,

involving the sense of taste . . . a mode of direct, bodily and vivid knowing." To describe and explain tonality fully may lie beyond the reach of words, Kidd says, but the mode by which one preceives tonality may not. "Tonality in a New Key," in Explorations in Music, the Arts, and Ideas: Essays in Honor of Leonard B. Meyer, ed. Eugene Narmour and Ruth A. Solie (Stuyvesant, N.Y.: Pendragon Press, 1988), 375.

2 Currently, "music theory" as a field of study distinguishes in itself these various kinds of experience to which it

can apply, for example. "In recent years the discipline of music theory has developed into a diverse field of inquiry encompassing a variety of subdisciplines. What is particularly striking about the present state of the discipline is its independence from the other principal branch of musical scholarship—historical musicology. . . . Now, however, the time may have come to encourage the dialectical process and to test the value of merging the two disciplines." (Music Theory and the Exploration of the Past, ed. Christopher Hatch and David W. Bernstein [Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993], 1).

3 Carl Dahlhaus, Studies on the Origin of Harmonic Tonality, trans. Robert O. Gjerdingen

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