Re: Chord Function?

"Orlando Enrique Fiol" <ofiol@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message 
news:MPG.22f53e0b205818469896b2@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> 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.
>
> Why this particular obsession with negation of tonality? Few poets have
> opted to negate vocabulary or grammar in favor of gibberish. Yet, the
> twentieth century saw a unique proliferation of highly organized music
> that sounded identical to entirely random music, both bent on avoiding
> tonality.

Well, let's not forget the visual arts world - they were really taking
their 
cue from them.

I think that with the written word, there is largely a cognitive issue.
With 
sound and sight, I think artists felt they could get by with just enticing

the ear or the eye, and not the brain.

Additionally, I think tonality was evolving out from under them. I think 
maybe Wagner was on the right track - but I think Schoenberg got to a
point 
where he said "I'm pretty much using atonality anyways, why not just go 
whole hog and create a system". I think that whenever you do that, you 
introduce artifice into the evolutionary process and as a result, there's 
going to a rupture in the space-time continuum!

I'd also like to point out that I've always believed the "mainstream" of 
evolutionary art music composition moved from Wagner, through Bartok and 
Stravinsky etc. into the Film Music of the 30s, 40s and 50s etc - until
pop 
music starts to re-assert itself in film. But while Schoenberg was
dabbling 
in serial music, most of the world was hearing Dmitri Tiomkin and people 
like that. So there's a lot of good music out there that's not in this 12 
tone serial category, that's still atonal, but has more "things to grab 
onto" than those other cats.


>
> Except that they misapplied popular monotonal theories of their day.
> These theories held that people could maintain a tonal center in their
> minds even when music wandered into very distant keys and remained there
> for long periods. What in fact happens with most listeners is that they
> just assume the tonal center has ****fted without necessarily caring how
> it happened. Schoenberg, in short, gave people's ears too much credit.

But I wonder, is the average listener even able to comprehend tonal center

at the level we do? Beethoven often spends a lot of time in a distant key
- 
did listeners really get that and be able to hang on to the tonic while he

was somewhere else? I agree that 12 tone takes it to the extreme, but
again, 
maybe that's not something that composers - even like Beethoven - were 
concerned about - that "contract" gets broken throughout history.

Steve