The Diatonic and the Chromatic in Schenker's "Theory of Harmonic Relations"

Abstract

Of all issues in music theory, few are more perplexing than explaining the coherence of highly chromatic tonal music. In many cases the difficulties are interpretative and vary from piece to piece. But more often the problems are conceptual in nature and stem from the basic ways in which we think about the tonal system. At least since the time of Rameau, theorists have defined tonality through diatonic relationships based on the major and minor scales. Consequently, they have regarded chromatic elements as elaborations of or substitutions for diatonic scale members. As Leonard B. Meyer explains, Chromaticism is almost by definition an alteration of, an interpolation in or deviation from this basic diatonic organization. While this approach works well enough for pieces in which chromatic elements appear as local inflections, it is less successful for thosesuch as Bach's Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue or Haydn's Chaos-in which chromaticism seems to dominate the texture. To account for these more extreme cases, theorists confront an awkward dilemma: either they must treat the works as mutations of diatonic structures, or they must place them outside the limits of normal tonal theory. Neither solution is satisfactory: the former largely devalues the structural implications of chromatic events, and the latter suggests that