page_title: Chromaticism
section_title: Chromatic line
hierarchical_section_title: Chromaticism / Chromatic line
caption_attribution_description: English: The opening bars of Dido's lament from the opera "Dido and Aeneas" by Henry Purcell
context_page_description: Chromaticism is a compositional technique interspersing the primary diatonic pitches and chords with other pitches of the chromatic scale. Chromaticism is in contrast or addition to tonality or diatonicism and modality. Chromatic elements are considered, "elaborations of or substitutions for diatonic scale members".
  Not only at the beginning of a composition but also in the midst of it, each scale-step [degree] manifests an irresistible urge to attain the value of the tonic for itself as that of the strongest scale-step. If the composer yields to this urge of the scale-step within the diatonic system of which this scale-step forms part, I call this process tonicalization and the phenomenon itself chromatic.
  — Heinrich Schenker
  Chromaticism is almost by definition an alteration of, an interpolation in or deviation from this basic diatonic organization.
  — Leonard B. Meyer
  Throughout the nineteenth century, composers felt free to alter any or all chord members of a given tertian structure [chord built from thirds] according to their compositional needs and dictates. Pronounced or continuous chordal alteration [and 'extension'] resulted in chromaticism.
context_section_description: In music theory, passus duriusculus is a Latin term which refers to chromatic line, often a bassline, whether descending or ascending.
  From the late 16th century onward, chromaticism has come to symbolize intense emotional expression in music. Pierre Boulez (1986, p. 254) speaks of a long established "dualism" in Western European harmonic language: "the diatonic on the one hand and the chromatic on the other as in the time of Monteverdi and Gesualdo whose madrigals provide many examples and employ virtually the same symbolism. The chromatic symbolizing darkness doubt and grief and the diatonic light, affirmation and joy—this imagery has hardly changed for three centuries." When an interviewer asked Igor Stravinsky (1959, p.243) if he really believed in an innate connection between "pathos" and chromaticism, the composer replied "Of course not; the association is entirely due to convention." Nevertheless the convention is a powerful one and the emotional associations evoked by chromaticism have endured and indeed strengthened over the years. To quote Cooke (1959, p.54) "Ever since about 1850—since doubts have been cast, in intellectual circles, on the possibility, or even the desirability, of basing one's life on the concept of personal happiness—chromaticism has brought more and more painful tensions into our art-music, and finally eroded the major system and with it the whole system of tonality."
  Examples of descending chromatic melodic lines that would seem to convey highly charged feeling can be found in:
  The death-wish of a spurned lover expressed in the madrigal "Moro lasso al mio duolo", by Carlo Gesualdo (1566–1613):
  The ground bass that underpins Dido's grief-laden Lament from Purcell's opera Dido and Aeneas (1689):
  The seductive melody of the aria "L'amour est un Oiseau Rebelle" from Bizet's opera Carmen (1875).: 
  The rich harmonization of a descending chromatic scale in the 'Sleep Motif' from Wagner's opera Die Walküre, Act 3 (1870). Donington (1963, p. 172) speaks of this music's "slow chromatic drift and its modulations as elusive as the soft drift into sleep itself, when the sharp edges of consciousness begin to blur and fade."
caption: Dido's lament. About this soundPlay (help·info) or Listen on YouTube.
exif: {}