TONALITY

Elia Grassi
Jul 28
2 min read

Updated: 3 days ago

"If we manage to render it imperceptible in one place,

it will assert its rule all the more strongly in another. [...]

The strength of the tonal relationship is nothing else

but the force of gravity in its most refined form."

Paul Hindemith, The Craft of Musical Composition

CENTER OF GRAVITY

When we are faced with a Western tuned instrument, and we try to compose or read a score, we often notice that a particular note emerges, attracting more attention than the others and dominating the musical discourse. Often, it is the note on which the musical phrase resolves. That note is called the tonic.

ETYMOLOGY

Originally, tónos indicated both the tension of a string and the resulting pitch from the degree of that tension. In musical contexts, already in the Hellenistic age, it referred to a scale based on a specific starting tone, but also to a mode or a musical state.

MAJOR AND MINOR

Alexander Choron, in 1810, used this term to describe the movement from the IV and V degrees towards the tonic. Since then, in the West, the term tonality has referred to the concept of functional harmony, typical of European music between the 17th and 20th centuries, based on the major and minor scales¹. This is not entirely meaningless or anachronistic, since even today Western instruments are tuned using equal temperament, which, due to the properties of its intervals², makes these two scales particularly attractive. Faced with instruments tuned in this temperament, even if we use modal or ethnic scales, the major and minor scales catch our attention—and the more we try to avoid them, the more we end up highlighting them. In the circle of fifths, all the major and minor tonalities are listed.

TODAY

For years, the term tonality was associated with these two scales, but although the Western system still revolves around them today, it's not uncommon to come across scores or analyses that speak of minor tonality when in fact it's a case of the Dorian or Aeolian mode. Therefore, it seems the term is recovering its original meaning of attractive center, no longer bound to a particular scale nor to a specific cultural system or temperament. Fétis defined tonality as a set of "necessary relations, both successive and simultaneous between the notes of the scale"³. This applies to any fundamental of any scale, especially when dealing with synthesizers and microtonal instruments, often disconnected from the equal temperament system.

NOTES