For music theory types only....

All right, everyone's invited to read this. But music theory geeks are probably the only ones who will care about it.

In classical music theory, we do something called "Roman numeraling." This means we assign the Roman numeral I to the first triad (or chord) of any given key signature, II to the second triad, III to the third, etc. This in turn implies a certain heirarchy of relationship between the various pitches in that key, a fixed system that gives Western tonal music its particular flavor.

It has always struck me that the system, while it works splendidly within limits, defies the truth of the human ear. When we hear pitches, we don't naturally hear fixed points in immovable heirarchy. We hear shifting relationships, an intricate web of possibilities that are limited only by the composer's decision-making process. From the composer's standpoint, this means there is a greater tonality than the system traditionally called "tonal." This tonality is intuitive and will not be limited by any system. When the standard-isue tonality of triads in rigid heirachy broke -- about a hundred years ago -- it produced a non-sensical thing called "atonality." Twelve-tone composers, as they were called, structured the dozen tones of the chromatic scale as discrete entities, completely unrelated to each other. What had been, under standard tonality, a system of relationships, became a system of anti-relationships, of pitches sounding wholly on their own.

While tonality and "atonality" seemed to be opposites, both were based on the assumption that either the relationship between pitches would be heirarchical and fixed, or there could be no relationship. But again, that's not how we hear. We hear infinite potential in even a single pitch. The composer's job is to explore that potential. A great composer does so without reference to any system, or at least in spite of having to work within a system.

I've developed these ideas in an essay just filed to NewMusicBox. Below is an excerpt. I'll let you know when the entire essay posts.

"Debussy averred that music is made only of rhythm and color. Pitch is a function of color; a matter of where, in the span of some universal monochord with infinite fundamentals, it falls, and of what other pitches are sounding at the same time. In the German-based tonal system common to our music, a B-flat is tonic because we say so and it remains tonic until we say otherwise by modulating away from it. In the French way of comprehending harmony, you can’t do that, for even if you play only a c minor chord and return to the B-flat, that B-flat chord is now changed forever. It has a different sonic context and is therefore a different entity. Its relationship to other pitch classes and to its own internal elements has shifted.

"Roman numeraling is an illusion based on the mistaken idea that tonal relationships must be codifiable or they cannot be tonal relationships. We are told to call the German system 'tonality' when, in fact, all relationships of pitch are inherently tonal -- not in the sense of adhering to an arbitrary system that posits stable tonics, but in the sense that every pitch in some way suggests every other pitch. There is not and cannot be any such thing as 'atonal' music."

- Kenneth LaFave