Re: Chord Function?

llatham@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 wrote:
>Like I said Orlando, I think initially there was a concern that if the
music 
>was not "totally opposite" of tonality, people whose listening
experiences 
>had been rooted in virtually only one thing (remember, we didn't have the

>kind of world-wide communication we have today) would still "listen for" 
>that thing in their music. So for them, I don't believe it was a question
of 
>creating atonality, but one of negating tonality. Even distribution
wasn't a 
>characteristic of tonality, so it seemed like the most obvious
alternative. 

Don't you find it odd that the twentieth century brought us this 
concentration of composers intent on negating tonality when similar 
negations of say vocabulary and grammar did not occur in poetry or novel 
writing? Why this obsession with the negation of tonality?

>Furthermore, we always say "atonality" but Schoenberg was interested in 
>"Pantonality" - where "all" note had equal rights to be the most
im****tant. 
>Even distribution again seems like a logical methodology to achieve this.

Even distribution banks on the ear's ability to hear aggregate patterns 
on different pitches and to process inversions of those aggregates as 
being equivalent. I've met few people able to listen this way. This 
false premise was based on popular nineteenth-century theories of 
monotonality in which people were given credit for maintaining a piece's 
initial tonal center even when it wandered off into very distant keys. 
In fact, most people simply assume a modulation has taken place without 
worrying about how it happened.

Orlando