Re: Chord Function?

"Orlando Enrique Fiol" <ofiol@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message 
news:MPG.22f53f63ad5f1cd9896b3@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
> 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?

Spite. People said "it's no good because it's not tonal". So they said,
you 
want non-tonal, I'll give you non-tonal!!!

Just like rock and roll - performers were hell bent on doing anything and 
everything that the former generation found offensive - they siad their 
music sounded tribal, so what did they do, play what they considered an 
"African" beat on drums. Guitar sounded "harsh" - well, they added more
and 
more distortion. Hair too long? We'll show you!

The same thing actually did occur in poetry - oh, you say it's no goo 
because it doesn't rhyme, well, I'll give you no rhymes then!!!

But as I said before, words are cognitive. You have to hear them, but for
us 
sighted folk, we see them and congate them. There have been studies that 
show that we can read words when all of the interior letters are mixed up
- 
as long as the first and last letter of the word is in place. So the 
appearance of the letters visually on the page make no difference to us.
But 
if you write gibberish, it's not useful for the eyes or the ears, or the 
mind.

With sound and art, it's different because even if mental meaning is gone
- 
like an abstract painting instead of a representational one (so a painting

of colored blotches on a canvas rather than a picture of a jar on a table 
for example), we can still appreciated the colors. They don't "mean" 
anything, and they're not supposed to.

With sound, I see it as similar - the sounds are not supposed to be 
recognizeable chords with their "meanings" as in the past - they're simply

successions of sound that exist solely for the enjoyment of each sound in 
succession. Whether one sound relates to another may not have been an 
im****tant consideration for the composer.

To draw a counter example - many people hear 15th and 16th century music
and 
say things like "it ends on the wrong chord". No, it didn't, you just
can't 
hear it outside of your common practice period mind set. The sounds are 
similar, but they have different meaning. Just like "Tone". Spelled the 
same, looks the same, sounds the same, but can mean "Timbre", or "a Note"
or 
"firm (as in a muscle)". So that second to last C chord in a Palestrina
work 
is not necessarily going to "mean" the 5 chord - it could be a Plagal 
Cadence.


> 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.

I wonder if this is because of our having heard tonal music our entire 
lives. People probably could listen this way if they were raised on only 
Schoenberg and his followers. We already know that westerners just can't 
take some Asian forms of music, but  many of the people from Asia seemed
to 
have no problem with it!


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.
>

I misread this before. Agreed.

Steve