Just Before Dawn

As I mentioned in my introduction, an important and daunting task in deconstructing (or at least loosening) overly essentialized and narrow self-image of the West for the sake of really understanding musicality (and most notably the function of rhythm) it is necessary to factor out the tonal lingua franca of the Common Practice and the canonization of masterworks composed during that time. This does not mean that the more than two centuries of music composed in Europe must be omitted from consideration or that specific masterworks are off limits. Rather, I mean to, as far as is possible, look at variety wherever there seems to be conformity, and to look at the heterogeneous practice of musicianship throughout Europe in its entirety wherever there seems to be a cult of individual genius. I believe that at this point in history, there is good reason to do this. In the last nine decades since the first World War, what was for so long held as a monolithic body of work and tradition that is the West disintegrated in its conformity in the tumultuous and much celebrated death of tonality.

To some, such a seemingly overblown claim would be synonymous with the supplanting of palatable concert music with the grotesque dissonance of the Second Viennese school and the institutionalization of systematic composition that would propel the Academy into half a century of discord. This is not the view I take, nor the type of death I believe came to Tonality. The death of tonality is simply the end to the supremacy of a highly sophisticated language of composition in which form hinges on the prolongation of polar harmonic tension between the tonic and its dominant.

The perfect tonal paradigm was as precarious ever a delicate object was made, and its undoing was rooted as far back as the late 18th century, if not before. The extention of tonality from its tonic to various related keys percipitated the standardization of temperament. Because of the increasing use of all available keys, modally borrowed chords and extended modulations, the resulting equal tempered scale was an inevitable outcome. And with the full use of the twelve keys, the tonal system began to resemble more and more a closed circular system - a system in which the gravity of the tonic was not something that could so easily be taken for granted. The system to which Shoenberg spectacularly nailed the coffin shut was already undone in a number of ways. The flat-VI key area that Schubert used in the early 19th century (and then Berlioz shortly after) opens up a set of circular key relationships far smaller than the full set of twelve. Taken one step further (and there is evidence of this in Schubert's Bb Piano Trio) the flat-VI of flat-VI short circuits the circle of twelve key areas to only three, thus calling into doubt the simple prominence of the tonic. Another way the tonal system was beginning to be undone before the time of Schoenberg was in composers such as Wagner, who would use absolute (and therefore not relative) key areas to underscore dramatic themes. To have a specific key area for the Grail theme is as un-tonal as anything, if the objective were to be prolongation of tension between tonic and dominant. In fact, the tradition of attributing affect to absolute key areas goes back quite a lot earlier than Wagner, and theories were written on the affective use of key areas at least as early as the 18th century. A third way in which tonality was becoming unravelled since the late 19th century also parallels the calling into question of Germanic hegemony in the classicalization of music, namely the use of modal material in nationalistic styles. This was a quiet revolution, but one that would prove critically damaging to the purity of tonality and would also provide a framework for the reorganization of pitch in the twentieth century. Almost all at once, Russian, Hungarian, English, Balkan, and Central Asian composers were using modal folk material in their work. Modality (see my chapter on modality vs. tonality) is a false sister to tonality - a Trojan Horse that can be introduced into a welcoming tonal scheme only to unleash an entirely different world of possibilities, driven by its own modal modus operandus.

The role of tonal harmony as a shaping force persists to the present day, with no signs of ceasing to be relevant and useful. But its supremacy as the driving force in music has been put aside for a very long time. As the twentieth and twenty-first centuries progressed, a great many methods of reorganizing pitch sprang up to fill the vacuum. Ethnic modes, synthetic modes, octatonic sets, dodecaphonic systems, minimalistic processes and tone color were all at work in shaping the pitch landscape of modern times. The long-standard (and under analyzed) norms for rhythm were also dissolved, with notable experiments made with non-metered rhythm, exotic material, manipulations of tempo modulations and the application of novel schemes and systems.

And yet, qualities of truly artistic musicianship persist throughout all these times of change. The sensitive faculties of a performer, the structural and visceral sensitivities of a composer, and the appreciation of the audience have never been abandoned. But it is true that a significant cause for anxiety in the twentieth century was the looming shadow of the nineteenth. Luciano Berio's Recital One demonstrates a bleak view of living under the crushing legacy of the past, while his Sinfonia is cautiously optimistic. And so I look to the rich but elusive hours just before the dawn of the Common Practice era, a mirror to the myriad 'isms' in the heterosylistic era succeeding its twilight. In "our" present insecurity in identifying Self in the demise of Westernness, a task in which "we" must confront the ethical spaces of Orientalism, Exoticism, appropriation and ownership and the inheritance of tradition, the distant past offers insight into what was lost and given up in the coalescence of that which is now undone. That insight can help to affirm the liberal universality of musicianship that makes the music of the present day the human, experiential and beautiful.

The documented evidence of musicality and material of the past is incomplete, and our understanding of music of the past gets foggier the further we delve into it. Admittedly, not all of our findings among the surviving literature of the centuries preceding the well-documented Renaissance will seem to be immediately useful in either reconstructing the past or understanding post-tonal musicality. And rhythm, my own primary interest, is the most elusive of all areas in rediscovering the late Middle Ages. Theories of twelfth and thirteenth century rhythm are highly speculative and controversial, and yet occasionally produce breathtakingly beautiful recreations of evidence peaking out from a buried past. To me, the study of what in spite of being so hard to know and fuzzy in surviving documentation really did happen is a call to adventure rather than cause for anxiety and hesitation. And in speculative reconstruction of Early Music we achieve something far more valuable than simply reviving some material out of old manuscripts. Through the careful use of tools of scholarship and cultural sensitivity, grounded in our visceral, musical intuitions we can, in putting together the incomplete pieces of the puzzle of this bygone era, see inside our musical selves.