Looking Back: Lessons Learned About Tonal Music from a Post-Tonal Perspective

Abstract

Looking Back: Lessons Learned About Tonal Music from a Post-Tonal Perspective Growing up musically bilingual, and actually speaking "aggregate music" asmy most comfortable tongue, I find that,while I am very much aware of the fundamental differences between tonal music and aggregate-based music, I am deeply intrigued by and attracted to those features that they share, the opportunities for engaging music making they both afford, and the lessons they can teach about each other.1 What I attempt in the following is to demonstrate some of these lessons, and in the process, suggest what I find attractive in a fairly wide variety ofmusic.2 I find it interesting that the sorts of relationships between the details and large-scale form, the particulars of a piece and the generali ties of itsmusical language, the immediacy of amusical surface and how its implications are played out in the strategies of a composition that I so admire in Schoenberg are so closely paralleled in themusic ofMozart, Andrew Mead 6 PerspectivesofNew Music Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms, and so many other musicians Schoen berg claimed as his forebears. I will start simply. Sometimes a single note, either as a pitch or as a pitch-class, can take on a particular significance in an aggregate work, emerging as a point of reference, and providing us with a trace of relationships we can follow through the music. Such significance can arise from the pitch-class's pattern of positions in the row-class, or additionally from compositional decisions about its articulation. An obvious example is found in Webern's Variations for Piano^ op. 27, in which theA above middle C forms the axis of a literal pitch inversion used to articulate the canons of the second movement.3 This is illustrated in Example 1. The changing place of the pc A in the movement's underlying rows participates in the music's overall pitch progression, and provides a very readily heard signal. The pitch-class A's broader significance in thework as a whole can begin to be recognized when we realize that the highpoint of the thirdmovement is also an A, and from there we can begin to track other sorts of relationships that prove useful in our understanding of the entire piece. The implications suggested here have been well explored, sowe shall turn towhat I think is a similar route into a tonal work. Mozart's Sonata for Piano in Bt, K 333, as is well known, also features a note, G, that takes on significance as both a pitch and a pitch class, whose significance grows both from its position in the tonal language of the work, and from its compositional articulation. * As Example 2 illustrates, the G at the top of the G-clef staff ismotivically highlighted at the opening of all threemovements. It isworth observing that this particular note is the highest G on Mozart's piano, somuch of the interest in this pitch in the work has to do with negotiating this particular compositional constraint. But the note G, as a pitch-class, also takes on significance from itsposition in the underlying tonal language, framed in the large in Bb Major. I will not trace this fullyhere, but will offer a brief analytical vignette that helps to focus some of these issues. Example 3 shows the very end of the exposition of the first movement, followed by the beginning of the development. As may be seen inExample 2, G, the very opening note of the piece, is scale degree 6, upper neighbor to scale degree 5, and participates in the opening bars in a 5-6-5 move from I to II. We may observe without pursuing it further that this same move, using these same notes, initiates the tonicization of the dominant in the transition. Suffice it to say, this note and these moves form a significant part of the opening argument of the piece. Sehrschuell j= ca. 100 ^ fii: ^ | ^J^^ J ^ ^ ^ '^J ^| ~j ^ ^ 8 9 5 7 4 (607l 2 t e 3 4 0 2 e rm] 9 5 6 t *~ t 9 1e 2 l065J 4 8 7 3^ 2 6 4 7 ^9 10 8...