The Art of Tonal Thinking

Abstract

T HE TOPIC of this paper has interested the writer intermittently for many years, and his interest in it has been responsible for more than twenty years of research and inventive effort to find means for facilitating accurate tonal thinking and the fluent expression of musical thought. This problem is as old as the phenomenon we call music. The ancient Greeks, including such intellectual giants as Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), Aristoxenus of Tarentum (4th Century B.C.), and Pythagoras (582487 B.C.), who invented the Monochord with frets to indicate pitch, sought solutions to this perplexing problem. Aristoxenus developed the Greek modes-Lydian, Dorian, Phrygian, Hypophrygian, Aeolian, etc. The tones of the modes were named after the seven strings of the lyre, from the highest, Hypate, to the middle or fourth string, Mesa, to the lowest or seventh string, Nete. To these basic names were added the prefix Para, meaning next to. Imagine trying to sing a foursyllable word like Paranete to a melodic succession in sixteenth-note rhythm, as in our song Dixie. Guido d'Arezzo (born c.990 A.D.), a choirmaster of the eleventh century, invented the music staff. Guido had the same difficulty then that we have today in training singers to think, read, and write in terms of tonal relations. Accordingly, he had his pupils practice singing while playing the tones on Pythagoras' Monochordused as a tonal space-frame. Guido, finding the polysyllabic Greek names of Aristoxenus unsingable, invented monosyllabic singing names, ut re mi fa so la, derived from the initial words of the lines of the Hymn to St. John. Here, as we all know, was the source of the British Tonic-Sol-Fa system, developed and promoted by John Curwen. This, in turn, was the source of the American Movable Do system. Carl Eitz, a German scientist and colleague of Wilhelm von Humbolt and of Hermann von Helmholz, developed an absolute system of arbitrary names which he called Tone-words. These consisted of monosyllabic phonetics for each of the tones and their chromatic inflections of sharps and flats, double sharps and double flats-some thirty-five different tonal phonetics with an initial consonant and the euphonious vowels a, e, i, o, u. The Eitz system has had wide use in Germany. It seems doubtful, however, that it could ever be adopted in our country because, unfortunately, the Eitz names have no connotation with our staff-notational system, with our pitch names, nor with the German pitch names. In France, the number system is used. It is known as the Galin-Paris-Cheve System-a method of teaching part-singing and part-reading with number 1 for do, 2 for re, 3 for mi, etc., and a zero for silence. The numerals are used only as graphic symbols, while the singing names are the sol-fa syllables with do the fixed pitch. Hence: the Fixed Do system. Even though the system was advocated by the French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau and the composer Hector Berlioz, it is difficult to see how it can help singers to think and sing precise intervals when the phonogram do-mi-so may represent a major triad, a minor, an augmented, or a diminished triad! The number system does not seem practical. Perhaps it is impractical because its authors were not practicing music teachers; Pierre Galin was a doctor, Aime Paris, a lawyer, and Emile Cheve another doctor.