Substance and Function in Concepts of Musical Structure

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

thought which have taken place in this century are, in my view, not so much assertions of radically new structural premises as they are small evolutionary steps by which the premises of the past are not overthrown and discarded, but are rather subsumed; in the process a new concept of structure is given birth. The very terminology -tonal, atonal--supports the idea of an antithesis, an incompatibility between the two idioms which obscures the conceptual dependence of the latter on concepts of structure gleaned from tonality. The link between the two, however, is far from obvious: the triad, as a tonal paradigm, does not evolve into some nontonal structure in accordance with some evolution of musical materials per se. Schoenberg's notion of the emancipation of dissonance proclaims such an evolutionary process, in which nontonal music results from a material process inherent in tonality. Here atonality emerges from the nurturing cocoon of past history into the spring sun of musical freedom. Such a notion is unreasonable for several reasons. First, it tends to see in the musical ideologies of the past a primacy of potential-a music yet unfulfilled, struggling like a natural force toward its inevitable destiny. This supports an injustice toward the musical accomplishments of the past. Second, it equates the development of harmony with