Tonality is not the opposite of atonality. I find it highly ironic that most of the people who use the term this way don't care for atonal music, but are by this usage conceding it an empire that it does not govern nor ever claimed.Andrew Stiller wrote: [snip]Rock (of which Pop, for the past 40 years, is a synonym, not a different genre) is not tonal. Triadic yes, diatonic yes, but not tonal. A genre in which one may cadence with any progression at all *except* the authentic, may end on a suspension or a seventh chord, or may fade out without any conclusion at all, cannot be called tonal in any sense that I would recognize.Ok, I'll bite.
Isn't tonality a concept bigger than, and inclusive of, the following subcategories?:
Triadic, Diatonic, Modal, and Functional harmonies
Whereas atonality means either:
1) no pitch
or
2) no strongly discernable pitch center.
I'm curious how you slice things up.
Tonality is synonymous with "functional tonality." It designates an elaborate and specific hierarchy (not just any old hierarchy, but the one we all spent two years learning in college) of chords relating to a tonic triad built on a designated tonal center; the progression of chords in a tonal piece is manipulated to create and dispel musical tension deploying a complex set of rules. The rulebook, established during the course of the 17th century, was gradually added to in subsequent years, but never fundamentally altered until the whole thing collapsed under the accumulated weight of all the exceptions and fudge-factors that it had acquired by the end of the 19th century.
When composers began to write music that included progressions that could not be accounted for under the tonal system, conservative critics coined the term "atonal" to refer to such lapses from orthodoxy. The word was modelled on "atheist," and was meant to imply that even the briefest excursion out of the tonal field constituted a rejection of the entire apparatus of functional harmony, which by then was considered a law of nature. The word was, in that sense, thrown at such composers as Debussy and Strauss, and was still being used that way when Diaghilev asked Stravinsky to make the ending of _Petrushka_ "more tonal."
When genuinely atonal music began to be written, its composers also still believed that functional tonality was a law of nature--that the occurrence of so much as a single triad or diatonic scale fragment would carry with it the whole elaborate apparatus of functional tonality, and that therefore these things must be rigorously avoided in any atonal piece.
Today we know better than that. The world is full of music that is diatonic and/or triadic, but not tonal. The vast majority of 20th-c. classical music is, in whole or in part, diatonic and/or triadic. It is not atonal, but it is not tonal either, which is what is signified by such terms as pandiatonic, nontonal, and post-tonal. Furthermore, all of this music and the atonal music written alongside it (often by the same composers) are considered by the vast majority of historians and composers to belong to a common musical community, reflecting very similar responses to a "crisis of tonality" brought on by the overload of fudge-factors mentioned above.
If "tonal" be defined so as to include all music that is not atonal, then all the following statements must be true:
The music of Guillaume de Machaut is tonal.
The music of Palestrina is tonal.
Balinese gamelan music is tonal.
African choral chant (from whatever culture) is tonal.
Indian ragas are tonal.
Gagaku is tonal.
The 12-bar blues is tonal.
But none of these things are true, not to any educated musician. To use the words "tonal" and "tonality" to refer to the entire musical universe except for the relative handful of pieces that are atonal is useless, even ridiculous. It's as if one referred to all the world's inhabitants as "non-Andorrans." Except, of course, for the Andorrans, who are thereby stigmatized.
--
Andrew Stiller
Kallisti Music Press
http://www.kallistimusic.com
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