'Is tonal composition dead?'

Anyway, that study is about consonance versus dissonance, not tonality versus atonality.

I've said before: you can write an atonal piece just with major triads.

Or tonal music with dissonance. Like, you know, most tonal music.

Yeah, calling Beethoven 'not really dissonant' is pretty ignorant.

I agree tonality isn't dead, and that it's been/is being combined with various other things.

I found an interesting article about infant responses at

MUSICAL TONALITY PREFERRED BY BABIES -- PSYCHOLOGY EXPERIMENT

Sorry, but starting from the already mentioned point that the concepts of consonance and tonality have next to nothing to do with each other, this article seems to be written with such a blatant lack of musical understanding, so even if these studies have produced some meaningful results (which I don't know), the article completely fails at interpreting them.

That's just yellow press journalism.

Anyway, we all know consonant intervals are more natural - that shouldn't surprise us at this stage.

If you disagree with that, it's probably insecurity about your own music.

(Note that I'm making no statements about music per se here, just intervals, and people.)

once again, the answer is: probably not

Anyway, we all know consonant intervals are more natural - that shouldn't surprise us at this stage.

If you disagree with that, it's probably insecurity about your own music.

(Note that I'm making no statements about music per se here, just intervals, and people.)

????? XD

I took the article more broadly than the group seems to have done.

First, I emphatically do not agree that consonance and tonality have next to nothing to do with each other.

It may be possible to write an atonal piece with major triads - though I hadn't considered that; I'd be interested to know what the result would sound like - is it also possible to write a tonal piece with no consonance? None at all?

At this point in my admittedly non-encyclopedic musical development, I really have to doubt that.

I took the article to indicate not that we're built to receive tonality, but rather sensory input which is capable of being integrated, such as a tonal melody.

From my own experience, I can grasp such a melody faster and reach greater degree of understanding than with a non-tonal line.

It may be possible to write an atonal piece with major triads - though I hadn't considered that; I'd be interested to know what the result would sound like - is it also possible to write a tonal piece with no consonance? None at all?

Both no problem at all. There's lots of atonal music with -tons- of major triads. Hell, the second piece of Sch

Both no problem at all. There's lots of atonal music with -tons- of major triads. Hell, the second piece of Sch

Those are major thirds, though. :P

Oh my, I've really not had enough sleep lately. :sweat: Triad and Third sound so terribly similar :(

Yes, the number of truly "atonal" pieces containing major triads on their own is rather rare, at least until the about 1980, because yes, it's true that a major triad easily gives a feeling of tonality, and the early "atonal" composers wanted their music to be heard out of this established context. But if you look at music written in the last twenty years or so, you'll find a lot of very "atonal" stuff that contains many major triads. Gubaidulina's "de Profundis" is one of the earliest such pieces, but also the later pieces of Luigi Nono, Ligeti, Kurt

But yes, I admit: It was an overstatement to say tonality and consonance have nothing to do with each other. They do to some degree. My point was to make clear that they're entirely different concepts.

I'd say it was just wrong, lol.

Tonality in the traditional sense is a system of interval importance organization. Take away this distinction and you end up with atonality or something that is neither here nor there. So indeed, "consonance" is a tonal-bound concept, since as Schoenberg put it, when you strip any distinction between intervals you end up with just "sonance."

Likewise, consonance can't exist without dissonance, so obviously if you kill one you kill the other. Anything that messes with the hierarchy of interval organization messes up what holds "tonality" together. If we treat all chords and intervals as equal and arbitrarily assign importance, you can end up with anything.

Just thought I'd say that. :>

Tonality in the traditional sense is a system of interval importance organization. Take away this distinction and you end up with atonality or something that is neither here nor there. So indeed, "consonance" is a tonal-bound concept, since as Schoenberg put it, when you strip any distinction between intervals you end up with just "sonance."

However, if Sch

Tonality in the traditional sense is a system of interval importance organization.

Its not distinction between intervals - its having a hierarchical system of classification of those intervals.

Clearly, there's a physical difference between the frequency differences of a third and a fifth, and a difference in perception and affect between them. But, tonality is that there are (traditional) ranks to these intervals.

SSC: Well, I don't agree entirely. And while it may have been Sch

SSC: Well, I don't agree entirely. And while it may have been Sch

Oh, I agree with pretty much everything you said there, SSC. Just not that the whole point of the idea consonance/dissonance idea is necessarily to establish such hierarchies and methods. It is simply the point it has in traditional tonality.

But I agree, often it's more adequate to use different terms to describe intervals/chords when dealing with atonal music, since the consonance/dissonance idea so historically charged.

But you can still imagine a music, for example, which uses a pool of chords classified by their "degree of consonance" as its base material (however you may define consonance exactly) and create a formal structure out of the, say statistical, distribution of these chords in the piece. The piece might start with octaves and fifths only and end with quarter-tone clusters. Of course you may just use different terms for this classification, such as describing perfect fifths as "more empty" and quarter-tone clusters as "more rich", or anything else of this sort, but fundamentally it's the same as making a distinction between consonance and dissonance yet using them without a tonal hierarchy.

As you said, it's probably mostly a matter of not using confusing terms that are too charged, but the line between tonality and atonality is so blurred anyways, that I don't think it matters that much in the end, especially since the idea of consonance and dissonance is so much older than classical western tonality.

And then there's always the concept of using a historical element as an "objet trouv

Well nobody said you couldn't mix and match. You can have your own interval organization system or preference, and then use V-I cadences in between and do all sorts of stuff. Nothing against that.

But the whole thing with interval systems and so on came up because someone was like "Well tritones are consonant in my system" and that's sorta bizarre. Not because it's WRONG or something, but because it could be said better as to cause less confusion. :>

Tonality could be dead in the sense that chess is dead in space. Or we could kill it by composing every possible piece (I can't even imagine what this means). If we compare music to other arts, it can die in a more important sense.

Literature, for instance. The language naturally inspires (or forces) certain phrases, rhymes and rhythms that become overused with time; similes and metaphors loose their initial flare, become banal and boring outside the original context.

If a cooking tradition has had a long and lively existence, any new disciple will risk making small variations or concoctions of various famous dishes. Your music may sound like a jumble of bits and pieces from famous composers.

Nabokov writing brilliantly about his first attempts at versification:

It did not occur to me then that far from being a veil, those poor words were so opaque that, in fact, they formed a wall in which all one could distinguish were the well-worn bits of the major and minor poets I imitated. Years later, in the squalid suburb of a foreign town, I remember seeing a paling, the boards of which had been brought from some other place where they had been used, apparantly, as the inclosure of an itinerant circus. Animals had been painted on it by a versatile barker; but whoever had removed the boards, and then knocked them together again, must have been blind or insane, for now the fence showed only disjointed parts of animals (some of them, moreover, upside down) - a tawny haunch, a zebra's head, the leg of an elephant.

In this sense, Tonality's obituary could only be written by a true friend, someone that knew him (lol) inside and out.

And, the thing is, IF you don't treat consonance/dissonance as a hierarchy you end up with stuff that fit better just saying "intervals" than consonance/dissonance because those terms are bound to specific meanings. That's what I'm talking about.

The distinction of intervals depends on the taste of the composer. I group intervals together in consonance/dissonance, not because of their structural significance, but because of their sound. A tritone sounds harsher than a major third. In this sense the intervals build two different families (and this is what Daniel's talk about the natural must mean). Questioning this is like attacking the use of "lighter/darker" in talk about colors. And what specific meaning do you imagine is bound up with the terms?

Schoenberg didn't free the intervals from some old-fashioned tyrannic hierarchy (he was a musical, not philosophical, genious), but wanted to free counterpoint from the shackles of tonal harmony. This is not done by destroying or denying a useful (even in twelve-tone composition) distinction, by wordplay.

I can accept if you say "a tritone is more dissonant than a major third", even though that can be challenged from certain points of view. However "a tritone sounds harsher than a major third" is definitely not as objective a distinction as between light and darkness. I personally don't find a tritone sounds harsh per se at all, sorry, but I'd never question that black is darker than white.

I can accept if you say "a tritone is more dissonant than a major third", even though that can be challenged from certain points of view. However "a tritone sounds harsher than a major third" is definitely not as objective a distinction as between light and darkness. I personally don't find a tritone sounds harsh per se at all, sorry, but I'd never question that black is darker than white.

Hah, dictionary proved me wrong. You are right. Dissonant is the right word. For some reason I imagined harsh to mean merely "coarse and rough to the touch" without that added unpleasantness. But, actually, I think the dictionary may be at fault here. The gathered "data" for the use of words may be affected by the common philosophical error of associating psychological effect with the meaning of a word. Unpleasantness may have slinked in this way. And this is especially dangerous if any dead 18th century author wanted to actually mean merely "coarse and rough to the touch." This is damn interesting actually. How the methodology of lexicography can affect our understanding of scripture, for instance.

True, but I don't even think "dissonant" necessarily means "coarse and rough". Again, a tritone doesn't sound either coarse or rough to me, I actually find it a rather neutral sound.

True, but I don't even think "dissonant" necessarily means "coarse and rough". Again, a tritone doesn't sound either coarse or rough to me, I actually find it a rather neutral sound.

Now you are making the mistake I thought you made with 'harsh'. We say of people that they are cold and warm, or cool and "on fire," in a secondary sense. Your rebuttal of my calling an interval harsh is now comparable to someone taking the temperature to check if a person is really cold. Saying that a tritone is harsher than a major third means that it is more dissonant, and nothing else. And I think that it is a beautiful way to compare touch with sound, since a tritone has more of those jagged egdes on its waves (bah, I wish I knew the technical terms) than a third. Of course, a poetical genious might find a more suitable word for us to adopt.

No, I'm just saying it's subjective. Just like calling a person "warm".

I certainly was aware that you weren't speaking using the term in a literal sense.

The point is that "dissonance" is an acoustical term, technical, even if poorly defined. "Harsh" isn't. They are different categories of describing a sound.

No, I'm just saying it's subjective. Just like calling a person "warm".

I certainly was aware that you weren't speaking using the term in a literal sense.

The point is that "dissonance" is an acoustical term, technical, even if poorly defined. "Harsh" isn't. They are different categories of describing a sound.

The warmth of a person is not merely subjective. What makes you think it is? And what does 'harsh' add that 'dissonance' lacks?