Academic literature on the topic 'Harmonic Practice in Tonal Music (2004)'

Introduction. Flamenco is a cultural phenomenon that dates back to the 5–6th centuries. This artistic practice organically unites plastic, gesture, singing, word, instrumental play. It is difficult to determine the hierarchical relationships between these components. Each of them has its own “vocabulary”, its own laws of constructing the artistic whole, that is, its canons. In a wide artistic field, canons consider a set of certain rules, based on which creative activity is carried out, and the originality of its result is ensured by the specificity of their improvisational transformation by a particular performer. Any phenomenon that is subject to the action of a set of these specific canons acquires formal, stylistic, genre qualities that indicate the cultural and artistic environment from which they originate. Flamenco is developing dynamically and actively absorbing the experience of other musical cultures. Any phenomena that fall into the gravitational field of the flamenco canons acquire the specific traits inherent in this culture. This assimilation of alien elements is defined by the concept of aflamencado (“one that acquires the characteristic features of flamenco”). Theoretical background. Contemporary views toward flamenco culture are very different: the discrepancies are noticeable among flamenco fans, performers and scientists. The paper of Marta Wieczorec “Flamenco: Contemporary Research Dilemmas” (2018) considers disputes about the scientific issue of flamenco. She pays attention to the debatable side in science comprehension of this ethnic phenomena and its place in Spanish culture. This article also looks at the antagonism between traditional and contemporary, or, “pure” and commercial branches of flamenco. William Washbaugh in his book “Flamenco music and national identity in Spain” (2012) considers as a ambitious project the tendency to rethink Spanish national identity under the influence of the spread of flamenco music culture, its various forms. Among many contemporary musicians, he also calls Miriam Méndez. The purpose of this paper is to identify the basic strategies of aflamencado in piano art of the XX century (the ways of interaction flamenco and piano performance art of this period). Such study requires the use of musicological and performing analytical methods of scientific research, among them the methods of genre and style analysis, historical and comparative approach that are applied on this paper. The genre theory by E. Nazaykinskiy (1982) is used in this study. This theory defines genres as historically established types and kinds of musical creation, which divides according to number of criteria: by purpose (public, common, artistic function); by conditions and facilities of performing; by content and ways of creation. Aflamencado characterization using the theory of T. Cherednichenko (2002) about typologique of musical practices allowed considering different methods of adapting the flamenco ethnic elements to the academic traditions and to determine the degree of transformation of the constituent elements of the synthesis. Research results. Piano art began to embrace flamenco culture in the late XIX century. The pioneer along this path was maestro F. Pedrell and his students. One of them, І. Albenis, composed the cycles for piano “Spanish Music” No. 1 (1886), No. 2 (1889) and “Iberia” (1906–1908), where the piano pieces are enriched with the characteristic flamenco sound. The piano texture includes some elements of guitar technique: the “razguiado”, which involves repeated chords, the “punteado” – accenting performance of each sound. Melody line of Albenis’s piano works correlates with flamenco due to its generous embellishments, melismatics and hangs in detentions, which are also a projection of flamenco vocal art. The metro-rhythmic sphere of the Spanish opus by I. Albenis is often based on the typical flamenco-“compass” associated with changeable the dual and triple pulsations. Tonal and harmonic reliance on Lydian and Phrygian modes and the use of the so-called “Andalusian cadence” (t-VII-VI-D) complements the palette of flamenco expressive means of expression. These aflamencado examples have some contradictions. The nature of the pianoforte is extremely elitist and aristocratic. The “wild” and arbitrary art of Spanish Roma from the poorest regions of Andalusia, when it falls into the sound pianistic “wrapper”, is transformed significantly and acquires an academic taste. Authentic art with its oral tradition of imitation is engraved in the musical text, such fixation sends flamenco to “foreign” territory, creating grounds to believe that the cycles “Spanish suite” and “Iberia” are examples of “composer expansion” on the flamenco territory. In this example, the principles of aflamencado have a specific vector directed into the sphere of “opus- music”, and a set of tools and techniques that allow to attract the characteristic features of folk practice, with its oral and collective nature (according to T. Cherednichenko’s typology of musical practices), to creation of original, individual, non-canonical composer work. In such interaction the resources of one cultural layer allow to reach of new artistic content in other. In this sense, aflamencado acts as a means of simulating a particular object of reality in the individual perception of the author. Aflamencado in the works of contemporary composer, arranger and pianist Miriam Méndez is oriented in the opposite direction. She called her first album “Bach por Flamenco” (2005). The intertextuality of this musical experiment provides radically new content to the work that has long been canonized. J. S. Bach’s Fugue is transformed into a target. The rigid, immutable confines of the genre are being tested by the ever-changing, flamenco element. The timbre, the properties of the tools used, the built-in “cante” – all serve to update the original. The pianist, who, along with other musicians, created this genre mix, was guided, mainly, by the idea of flamenco. Conclusions. Thus, in the contemporary piano art, the aflamencado phenomenon reveals a dual nature that depends on the basic level of interaction between cultures. In one case, composer creativity engages a flamenco resource to implement authorial creative strategies. Otherwise, the composer’s work is being “prepared” for the purpose of immersing it in the primordial folk element. As a result, two fundamentally different models of pianism are formed – the academic and its flamenco variety adapted to the musical-linguistic canons. This version of piano performance in listening circles was called “flamenco-pianism”. The hybrid nature of this phenomenon now needs in further investigation.

The present study examines both gradual and rapid changes occurring in 20th-century jazz harmonic practice. A newly-assembled corpus of 1,086 jazz compositions was used to test the idea that jazz music exhibits a mid-century decline in traditionally “tonal” chord usage. Evidence was found for slow, incremental changes in zeroth-order chord quality distributions, consistent with gradual, unconscious changes in harmonic usage. Typical tonal chord-to-chord transitions became less common between the 1920s and the 1960s, consistent with the hypothesis of tonal decline. Finally, use of root motion of an ascending perfect fourth dropped suddenly in the 1950s, suggesting that chord-to-chord transitions might be more susceptible to rapid change than chord frequency. Possible constraints on stylistic evolution are discussed.

Our understanding of the long-term tonal relationships that grow out of seventeenth-century harmonic language is at an elementary stage. An enormous gap seems to exist between our ability to deal with, on the one hand, a sixteenth-century compositional language that basically adheres to a contrapuntal technique and tonally abides by the rules of modality and, on the other, an eighteenth-century tonal language for which we quietly assume harmonic functionality. That scholars have largely avoided an investigation of harmonic language in the seventeenth century is perhaps surprising. Problematic and somewhat enigmatic features of seventeenth-century music are, in some cases, not very different from the characteristics Harold S. Powers attributed to late sixteenth-century modal music: ‘sometimes faintly exotic, often charmingly vague and undirected to our ears, but hardly alien’. Benito V. Rivera appeared to corroborate Powers's perception when he characterized some of the idiosyncrasies of seventeenth-century harmonic practice as ‘isolated harmonic quirkiness’.

Research in music perception has typically focused on common-practice music (tonal music from the Western European tradition, ca. 1750–1900) as a model of Western musical structure. However, recent research indicates that different styles within Western tonal music may follow distinct harmonic syntaxes. The current study investigated whether listeners can adapt their harmonic expectations when listening to different musical styles. In two experiments, listeners were presented with short musical excerpts that primed either rock or classical music, followed by a timbre-matched cadence. Results from both experiments indicated that listeners prefer V-I cadences over bVII-I cadences within a classical context, but that this preference is significantly diminished in a rock context. Our findings provide empirical support for the idea that different musical styles do employ different harmonic syntaxes. Furthermore, listeners are not only sensitive to these differences, but are able to adapt their expectations depending on the listening context.

psychoacoustic theories of dissonance often follow Helmholtz and attribute it to partials (fundamental frequencies or overtones) near enough in frequency to affect the same region of the basilar membrane and therefore to cause roughness, i.e., rapid beating. In contrast, tonal theories attribute dissonance to violations of harmonic principles embodied in Western music. We propose a dual-process theory that embeds roughness within tonal principles. The theory predicts the robust increasing trend in the dissonance of triads: major < minor < diminished < augmented. Previous experiments used too few chords for a comprehensive test of the theory, and so Experiment 1 examined the rated dissonance of all 55 possible three-note chords, and Experiment 2 examined a representative sample of 48 of the possible four-note chords. The participants' ratings concurred reliably and corroborated the dual-process theory. Experiment 3 showed that, as the theory predicts, consonant chords are rated as less dissonant when they occur in a tonal sequence (the cycle of fifths) than in a random sequence, whereas this manipulation has no reliable effect on dissonant chords outside common musical practice.

This article introduces the concept of the transcendental oscillation, in which two chords alternate with one another in a way that transcends traditional tonal practice. This harmonic device appears in a wide variety of settings from Wagner to modern pop music. After discussing some theoretical properties of transcendental oscillations, including their interactions with modality and chromaticism, I analyze transcendental oscillations in the works of Debussy, who made the technique a central component of his style. In Debussy's music, transcendental oscillations may be either intensifying or calming. They are symptomatic of what Sylveline Bourion calls Debussy's "duplication" tendency. As progressions foreign to common practice, they present a novel aspect, but as repetitive progressions, they are easy on the ears. These two central features of transcendental oscillations—their harmonic freshness and their repetitive quality—combine to make them well suited to Debussy's compositional project and attractive to composers to this day.

The late 19th-century dualism of Hugo Riemann exemplifies a widely recognized tendency in Western cultures to think in binary pairs. In recent theoretical writing the primary dualism between major and minor modes has provoked little or no controversy. But the attendant opposition between, respectively, authentic and plagal harmonic systems has not found widespread acceptance, because theorists have been unwilling to grant the latter equal status to the former. An alternative is to accept the validity of the two systems and at the same time to recognize the inequality that comes with any binary pair, thus acknowledging the "otherness" or, to borrow a term from linguistics, the "markedness" of the plagal system. In an essay from 1889, Riemann explored striking harmonic effects in the Andante of the Fourth Symphony and another late orchestral movement by Brahms, discerning the same non-diatonic scale behind the (plagal) idioms in both. The Phrygian and Aeolian scales enable similar unusual plagal passages in two chamber movements by Brahms, the early Adagio mesto of the Horn Trio and the very late opening Allegro from the Clarinet Trio. In these movements plagal harmony appears in a strong sense as the other of authentic harmony and perhaps even of common-practice tonality itself. The semantic significance of certain plagal moments in both has to do above all with their ability to suggest something other than, outside of, or prior to tonal music.

This study explores the topic of music theory pedagogy in conjunction with the Kodály concept of music education and its North-American adaptation by Lois Choksy. It investigates the compatibility of the Kodály Method with post-secondary instruction in tonal harmony, using a theoretical framework derived from Kodály’s methodology and implemented as a teaching strategy for the dominant-seventh chord. The customary presentation of this concept is authenticated with an empirical case study involving four university professors. Subsequently, Kodály’s four-step instructional process informs a comparative analysis of five university-level textbooks that evaluates the sequential placement of V7, examines the procedure by which it is presented, and considers the inclusion of correlated musical excerpts. Although divergent from traditional approaches to tonal harmony, Kodály’s principles and practices are pedagogically effective. By progressing from concrete to abstract, preceding symbolization with extensive musical experience, conceptual understandings are not only intellectualized, but are developed and internalized.

This chapter examines Fanny Hensel’s responses to the flow of syntax, thought, and feeling across poetic couplets. Poetic analysis identifies instances of syntactic independence and dependence between couplets, as well as logical relations of interpretation, opposition, and continuation. Hensel’s settings are shown to respond with precisely calibrated tonal shifts, cadences, sequences, harmonic changes, declamatory rhythms, and textures. Comparisons of settings by Hensel and Robert Schumann highlight distinctive aspects of Hensel’s compositional practice. The chapter considers couplet settings first in song beginnings, and then in song continuations with particular song forms (strophic, varied strophic, and ternary) in mind. The chapter builds on prior work by Stephen Rodgers and R. Larry Todd, which draws attention to the tonal fluidity of Hensel’s music. Implications for performance and music-text relations are considered as well.

Since Alexandre Choron and François-Joseph Fétis coined the term tonalité, the nature and history of the Western “common practice” tonal style has vexed music theorists and historians. This chapter argues for a pluralistic approach to studying tonality’s history, and advocates a model that centers rhythm, meter, phrase structure, and form rather than pitch content. Refocusing our attention on parameters that regulate pitch content, rather than pitch content itself, can help us to separate the emergence of tonality in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries from incremental changes in background scale commonly described as modes and keys. Instead, we might consider how regulatory parameters create expectation: strategicallydeployed dominant arrivals prepare and predict eventual tonic returns.

This paper discusses the potential of musical corpus studies, taking research on common-practice tonal harmony as a case in point. Based on a brief depiction of a project carried out at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and two novel datasets of harmonic analyses of music in the classical style, we elaborate on research questions, applications, and the need of extending the annotation standard used.