Tonality in Western Culture: A Critical and Historical Perspective
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.40 (514 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0271003596 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 306 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2015-06-29 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Christopher A. Fulkerson said Warning to Informed Persons. I have not read this book, but based on a clearly written review by someone at GoodReads named Otto Lehto I am not likely to. I am familiar with the background of the kind of thinking about which Lehto is more diplomatic than I am, and I think this sounds like a dangerous book.Lehto writes: "Instead of a clear progression or a natural necessity towards full chromatism and free tonality (to be short: Wagner and Schoenberg), Norton argues for certain human universals that are eternal but also take an infinite variety of forms (scales, t
Tonality is, rather, Norton contends, a decision made against the chaos of pitch and for the human potential to create works of music that speak with integrity and beauty, that as aesthetic creations neither lag behind nor rush ahead of human enjoyment and understanding.. Norton isolates the role of traditional music theory in the creation of models that attempted to explain tonality solely in terms of the concretized and limited objectivity of the musical score.The author evaluates and discards those features of logical positivism, scientific empiricism, idealism, and vitalism that in his view have encumbered virtually all speculation on tonality. The book's approach is particularly indebted to the thought of Theodor Adorno, the member of the Frankfurt School of critical theorists that Norton finds most capable of suggesting an authentic dialectic of tonality. This book initiates 'the first critical appraisal of the whole of Western tonal consciousness, from the discoveries of Pythagoras to the latest popular song.' While tonality has been unwittingly championed as the product of the bourgeois age in Europe and America from 1600 to 1900, Norton states, keycentered music is understood here merely to exhibit components of an encompassing sonic expressivity as durable as any language. The