From: alves@calvin.usc.edu (William Alves)
Newsgroups: rec.music.classical
Subject: Re: tonality and modern music
Date: 18 Nov 1992 11:43:48 -0800
Organization: University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA
NNTP-Posting-Host: calvin.usc.edu

In article <1992Nov18.002107.24042@credence.com> jeffw@or.credence.com (Jeff Winslow) writes:
>In article <x#w1+yc@rpi.edu> mccomt@aix.rpi.edu (Todd Michel McComb) writes:
>>       There is also an explosion of musical experiences available from
>>all over the world: from India, Indonesia, China and the Middle East.  These
>>powerful and varied traditions are to me the most damaging evidence against
>>assigning any priority to the "traditional" tonal idiom.  Clearly, these
>>cultures have produced and are producing direct and powerful music in an
>>"atonal" idiom. 

>This is the only thing I really balk at. Certainly no other culture's
>traditional music is based on what we call "functional harmony", but
>I would be very surprised to find music from a non-western tradition
>which neither a) has a pitch center, or b) doesn't use some (probably
>unequal-tempered) version or subset of a diatonic scale. 

Point A is very true. There are very few traditions in the world that I
know of that don't have some sort of concept of pitch center/tonal cen-
ter. Those that do not I would be very hesitant to call "atonal" lest
it conjure up a kind of tribal Schoenberg. There are Tibetan chants, for
example, that are based on clusters. There is plenty of music for instru-
ments of indefinite pitch or no pitch. But almost all music from India,
China, Indonesia (excepting PERHAPS genggong or music for unpitched
instruments), and the Middle East that I know of has some concept of a
pitch center. There are other types of music that I can think of where
the tonal center is sometimes ambiguous -- some pentatonic music of China,
for example, or Medieval chant, for that matter. But I'm not sure I would
call any of this "atonal."

One of the more frustrating misunderstandings that I encounter, even with
scholars is the confusion between tonality in the sense that we speak of
"tonal counterpoint": the harmonic language and set of conventions used
during the common-practice period in the West; and tonality in the sense
of having SOME SORT of pitch center. In the former sense, Gregorian chant
is not tonal - it is "modal." In the latter sense, of course, chant is
tonal.

Point B I'm less in agreement with. It is true that if you push equal tem-
perament to its extremes that a lot of the world's scales seem to fit into
diatonicism or a subset of that. There have been a lot of theories trying
to account for this supposed universality, such as Hornboestel's theory of
the overblown fifth. Perhaps there is something there, but I think they
have blown the similarities out of proportion and lost sight of the impor-
tance of differences in tuning systems. Where does one draw the line as to
what's diatonic and what's not? Certainly Thai scales with their nearly
equal 5 pitches per octave are not diatonic, but there are still some who
try to fit such systems into collections of whole and half steps.

However, the point is taken. A close look at the world's music is recommended
for anyone who thinks that a lot of features of music are universal. I
would certainly say that harmonic progressions, counterpoint, and diatoni-
cism are NOT universal -- far from it. However, the sense of having a single
pitch class center, while not completely universal, is the rule rather than
the exception.

Bill Alves