RETI, RUDOLPH. Tonality in Modern Music

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2013

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About

the

Author

Dr. Rudolph Reti, a musician-critic par excel-

was a respected composer and pianist as well an important theorist. He was born in Serbia, reared in Vienna, and received his doctorate from the University of Vienna. After undertaking a career as a concert pianist, he turned to composition and music criticism, and for many years was chief music critic of a daily newspaper. In 1922 he helped found the International Society for Contemporary Music. In 1939 he came to the United States. At about the same time, he embarked on a fresh study of the creative process, disowning all but two or three of his earlier compositions and virtually abandoning composing for the next eleven years. In 1951, he and his wife Jean, a noted concert lence,

as

pianist,

moved

to Montclair,

New

Jersey, where,

he was to produce a nummajor musical works which he felt would

until his death in 1959,

ber of

stand the

test of his

concept of pantonality.

RUDOLPH RETI

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NEW YORK,

BOOKS NLY.

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Tonality in

Modern Music

appeared under the

title

published by arrangement with

The

originally

Tonality, Atonality, Pantonality

This Collier Books edition

is

Macmillan Company Collier

Books

is

a division of The Crowell-Collier Publishing

Company First Collier

© by Jean Reti

Books Edition 1962

1958 1958 by Rockliff Publishing Corporation Revised edition 1960 published by Barrie & Rockliff Hecho en los E.E.U.U. Printed in the United States of America

First published

This book is dedicated to the generation of young musicians today; for only through their creative interpretation can it attain its true meaning

Author's Preface The following study was

written within a few months. content developed as the result of almost a lifetime's search. Thus a few words about the idea which motivated the search may be justified. This book is meant as a plea and stimulation for that part of the contemporary compositional endeavour which

But

its

outspokenly "modern" in style, perhaps even radically at the same time attempts to retain and renew the vitality of expression and human appeal that always characterized great music. In this sense the book may find itself somewhat in opposition to compositional manifestations derived from the concept of atonality and some techniques affiliated with it. But it will also, and perhaps even more strongly, be in opposition to those contrary tendencies that seek a solution in aesthetic eclecticism, in the necessarily futile attempt to fill old shells with artistic life. Instead, the book will set up an artistic goal of its own, neither tied to the rigidity of a new structural scheme, nor directed towards musical formations of the past. Though, therefore, the impulse behind the following deductions is an aesthetic and spiritual one, the presentation of this imis

modern, yet

pulse

may

often inevitably assume a technical character.

However, the reader

will understand that the technical terms are merely formulations through which in the musician's vernacular the artistic and human ideas, which are

the real issue in this study, can be

more

accurately de-

scribed.

There

is still

one point which should be stressed from

the outset, in order to avoid any misunderstanding. Al-

though

it is

the purpose of this study to describe the evolu-

contemporary music, the following presentation will have to use works of individual composers to demonstrate these principles. Yet it should be understood that these composers are not introduced and discussed for their own sake as it were, that is, in order to evaluate their general artistic achievement, but only in so

tion of certain principles in

7

8

/

Author's Preface

far as their

work

points to certain specific trends, the de-

which is the goal of our explanations. Thus, if for instance a composer of the artistic magnitude of Strawinsky is discussed only with respect to one compositional scription of

aspect, the rhythmical, this does not imply that his creative significance is considered to be limited to this one sphere. Neither is any aesthetic evaluation intended if many widely acclaimed composers of today are mentioned only in passing or are not mentioned at all. This book does not purport to give a picture of the modern musical scene, but merely to demonstrate one of its specific trends, a trend which, moreover, only now begins to assume some clearly perceptible silhouette. Only what seemed to the author to be pertinent to this specific evolution and he is well aware that even so his endeavour must remain very incomplete was included in the analysis.

—

—

Contents

7

Author's Preface

The Problem Summarized

17

PART ONE Tonality 1

Harmonic Tonality

2

Melodic Tonality The Experiment of Twofold Tonality The Tonality of Debussy

3

25 32 33

36

PART TWO Atonality 1

2 3

Schoenberg's Search for a New Style Composition with Twelve Tones Twelve-Tone Technique in Evolution

51

60 67

PART THREE Pantonality

and Polytonality Fluctuating Harmonies

77 80 84 88 88 95 98 108

Bitonality

Moving Tonics Specific Facets of Pantonality

Consonance and Dissonance Tonality through Pitches

A-Rhythm and Pan-Rhythm Pantonality and Form The Evolution of "Colour" The Electronic Wonder

in

Music

119 123

10

4

/

Contents

The Role of Pantonality as a General Synthesis The Great Structural Dilemma of Contemporary Music

127 131

Aesthetic Epilogue

1

2

Romantic Anti-Romanticism Each Time Engenders its Art the Time The Ivory Tower

—Art

143 Generates

147 149

Musical Illustrations

155

Acknowledgments

185

Index

187

Musical Illustrations

155

Melodic Tonality

Ex.

1

Ex.

2 The Tonality of Debussy

156

Ex.

3 Emerging Tonal Complexity

158

Ex.

4 Schoenberg's Twelve-Tone Technique

159

Ex.

5.

The Twelve-Tone Technique

Two

Alban Berg

160

Contrasting Structural Types:

164

Bela Bartok

164

Anton Webern

166

Ex.

6

I

Ex.

7

II

Ex.

8

Ex.

9 Hindemith's Polyrhythm

A

of

Rhythmical Pattern from Strawinsky

168

169

Ex. 10 Charles Ives

170

Ex. 11 Pierre Boulez' A-Thematic Serial Structure

174

Ex. 12 Benjamin Britten's "Tonal Multitonality"

175

Ex. 13 Aaron Copland

177

Ex. 14 Andre Jolivet

178

Ex. 15 Rudolph Reti

181

TWELVE-TONE OR TWELVE-NOTE The term "Twelve-note" was used

in

Orpheus

in

New

Guises by Erwin Stein (Rockliff, 1953) in the passages translated by Hans Keller and in Composition with Twelve

Notes by Josef Rufer translated by Humphrey Searle (Rockliff, 1954). "Twelve-tone" is used in this book because that is how the late Rudolph Reti wrote it and an alteration throughout without the knowledge of the author might in some instances have implied shades of meaning which were not the author's, particularly in view of the main title of this work, which is being published simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic.

—The

Publisher

Tonality in

Modern Music

The Problem Summarized Around the turn of the century as

is

generally

the physical sciences,

known, underwent an extraordinary change.

Alfred North Whitehead, for instance, speaks repeatedly of the tremendous impression this great and almost sudden change made on his mind and views. About 1880 the laws of physics, as they were

known

then,

seemed

to represent

something like an eternal truth, definitely established for all time. What remained to be done, said Whitehead, seemed to be merely the co-ordinating of a few newly discovered phenomena with the basic Newtonian principles. Then "by the middle of the 1890's there were a few tremors, a slight shiver as of all not being quite secure, but no one sensed what was coming. By 1900 the Newtonian physics were demolished, done for!" x However, even if the actual force of the old laws seemed to have vanished, their usefulness and validity within their own realm did not by any means disappear entirely. In fact, one main goal of modern physics seems to be centred on the endeavour to comprise and unify the old and new principles in one all-comprehensive law or formula. The whole process, which is especially conspicuous in physics due to the paramount importance physical discoveries have assumed with regard to our material way of life, can also be observed in many other spheres, for instance in the psychological, the social and the political domain, and even in the arts, and particularly in music. It is well known, not only to the musician but to every musical listener, that the whole set of principles which lay, consciously or instinctively, at the basis of all music from the so-called classic and romantic period (roughly speaking the period from Bach to Brahms and Wagner) began to crumble, as far as the compositional practice was concerned, in the 1880's or 90's. Consequently, the music of x

Lucien Price, Dialogues with Alfred North Whitehead,

Little

Brown, 1954.

17

18

/

Tonality in

Modern Music

modern music, is in its not only different from but in some respects fundamentally opposed to that of the preceding centuries. This fundamental change was felt in almost all the various spheres through which the composer expresses himself, such as the melodic and rhythmic shaping, the thematic construction, the architectural patterns, even the instrumentation. But the most conspicuous, the most incisive change took place in the realm of harmony or, since harmony may in this connection be a slightly inaccurate term (and we shall return to this later), in what by a more the twentieth century, the so-called

whole concept of

style

comprehensive technical term is referred to as tonality. Tonality, during its undisputed reign of several centuries, was so taken for granted and became so entrenched in the musician's

mind

as the natural, the "eternal" con-

cept of musical construction that when, because of

overlong use (and finally abuse) inevitable, the first slight signs

shocked the musical world to the core. peculiar

misnomer

its

abandonment became of such an abandonment its

From

this fact

a

—a misnomer

in terminology resulted

of fairly far-reaching consequences; namely that to all music that did not fit into the customary and sanctified

concept of tonality, the term atonality was applied. This term, however, was a gross exagat least at that time geration. And today we would certainly not call atonal the music of, for instance, Strauss, Reger or Mahler, for which the term was originally often used, nor that of their French contemporaries, Debussy or Satie. Yet the term became generally accepted and although we would in our time dis-

—

—

criminate more carefully between atonality in a specific, concrete sense and atonality as a general and vague idea, there is, even today, much confusion prevalent regarding this subject.

But there were more serious consequences involved than merely inaccurate terminology. The abandonment of tonality, which in the beginning was but a slight deviation, became stronger and more violent year by year until in the so-called twelve-tone music even a learnable technique seemed to have been provided through which pure atonality, if one so wished, could be

The Problem Summarized maintained in music.

2

The adherents

/

19

of this trend towards

outright atonality soon proclaimed their principles as the

only valid ones, by setting up a kind of doctrine, a formula somewhat like this: "Harmonic concepts in our epoch gradually progress from a governed and conditioned state, that is tonality, to a free and unconditioned of evolution

is in between repreapproach the beckoning goal, which can only be pure and genuine atonality." Strangely enough, the composers who did not submit to the atonal lure and they still constitute the majority nevertheless were swayed by this doctrine of the atonalists. Although from an aesthetic point of view they naturally rejected the idea that music of rank had to be in the extreme atonal vein, they nevertheless, misled perhaps by the prevailing terminology, accepted tonality and atonality as

state, that is atonality,

while

all

that

sents merely a timid attempt to

—

the only contrasting possibilities of musical formation. The situation, they thought, left no room for any further al-

one end of the road, atonality other states are more or less stages between the two extremes. Yet and this is the decisive point of that theory there is only one, single road. An alluring scheme however, musical reality is not as simple as this. For atonality, that is, abandonment of and ternative: tonality stands at at the other

—

all

— —

—

from traditional concepts, was only the one, the negative side of the development. But beside this liberation, something far more vital, something far more radical was in the making: a third concept, as different from toliberation

nality as it is from atonality, but no less different from the intermediary states, such as extended tonality, modality, polytonality and the like. Indeed, looking at the musical development of the last half century we realize, as it were in retrospect, that from the very time when tonality began to be loosened and was finally abandoned, the evolution 2

That

was the innermost idea and purpose of the twelve-tone uncontradictably proved through numerous remarks and directions of its inventor (notwithstanding that he avoided the term atonality) even though later adherents of the technique, significantly, tried to compromise by allowing tonal features, as "licences," to slip back into the atonal scheme. (We shall return this

technique

is

—

to this later.)

20

Modern Music

Tonality in

/

worked in two opposite directions. One trend worked away from tonality towards atonality, as indicated above. But another trend, which also left classical tonality behind, tended towards another goal, different from and almost opposite to atonality. No specific name has as yet been introduced for the state towards which this trend pointed. All we can say in trying to give a rough indication of the idea in question (later we shall describe it more concretely)

new

is

that

it is

an endeavor to develop patterns of a higher cycle, tonalities of a

tonalities belonging to

hitherto undefined nature

which

in the musician's

specific

If,

in using these terms,

are connected with certain

phenomena, we run the

understood.

risk initially of being mis-

we suggest pantonality 3 as a linnew concept, we do it with some

moreover,

symbol for

guistic

—although

mind

this

appeared sporadically in even though used there in a vague, casual way, without any concrete meaning attached to it. In fact, it has sometimes been confused with its outhesitation, for pantonality has

some

treatises as a term,

right opposite: "atonality."

Nevertheless, pantonality in the specific sense as intro-

duced here seems the only fitting designation, considering the three great categories which are to be presented in the following pages as the successive states of harmonicstructural expression during the last centuries. First tonality, in which music was rigidly tied to relationships derived from the natural phenomenon of the overtone series. From here, over extended tonality and related intermediary stages, the evolution moved in two opposite directions: one road leading to atonality, which cut these ties and thus, when carried to fulfilment, produced a state of outright

non-relationship; the other road aiming at pantonality,

which on a higher plane and with a new type of composiand in the wake of which a whole complex of new technical devices will be seen to emerge indeed, even a new contional formation develops the idea inherent in tonality,

—

cept of

Pan

harmony

itself.

of course, the ancient Greek word for "all" or "whole." is a meaning of universality, of totality, attached to pan, somewhat beyond that of "all."

3

is,

But there

The Problem Summarized

/

21

To describe these stages and, in particular, the twofold, divergent directions which made the music of our age strive towards two contrasting goals, and to suggest how and atonality may finally perhaps be led to a synthrough the rallying power of pantonality is the pur-

tonality thesis

pose of

this study.

PART ONE

TONALITY The purpose of this study, as indicated in the foregoing pages, is an inquiry into a theexplored structural concept ,i has been chosen as the technical term. Yet, it will be unavoidable to trace the hidden origin of the new concept first within the realm of those wellknown musical provinces: tonality and atonality. Here the reader is begged to follow our deductions with some patience, even if for a few pages the presentation may seem to repeat long-known facts, and perhaps assume almost a touch of the classroom study. We trust he will soon realize that some seemingly elementary phenomena may appear in a different light, if interpreted with a view towards their changed application in a new musical style.

oretically

for

which

little

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