A New Tonality

One of the things musicians wrestle with, particularly if they compose music is the problem that... everything's been done. From the Age of Polyphony to Schoenberg (somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,000 years) or in jazz from Louis Armstrong to Ornette Coleman (about 40), the harmonic palette has been explored to its utmost. You can argue that although music is essentially made up of three constituent parts, melody, harmony and rhythm, that it's the stretching of harmony to it's breaking point (that is to say the stretching of what the listener will accept and imbue with meaning) that has defined its progression more than anything else. Early in the 20th century the last harmonic boundaries were broken with the advent of the atonal and... we ran out of notes! There are only 12 after all and now... they had all been used up.

What to do? It was a crisis to a degree! Would everything now have to leave tonality behind to even be relevant any more? These were open questions in the early part of the 20th century and in many ways it brought things to a standstill. Plenty of tonal music kept getting written - much of it brilliant - but there was always a question lurking in the shadows regarding any new works - does it, any of it... matter? Sometimes it takes decades to come up with answers to these sorts of things and we're only just starting to get there now. Although there's nothing wrong with atonal music, it's fascination mainly lies in the world of musical theoreticians. Most people, even those who love classical music and have tried to make themselves like the avant-garde, often... can't! So, is atonal music a failure? No... it's just not a popular thing to listen to - it has it's place, but it doesn't really effect people all that much emotionally. And... that is a problem. You can make a very convincing argument that effecting people emotionally, distracting them and getting them to think and view things differently than they have previously... is the whole purpose of art. If a thing of theoretical interest can't do that... maybe it's just not all that important.

But if that's not the future... what is??? Minimalism? Well, it has definitely had its time and place, but that seems past now. Maybe, the avant-garde, minimalism or the various fusions of late romantic ideas with modern techniques really don't cut it either. It seems quite possible that none of those things are the next step, just stuff people were doing while the culture went its own way - which is to say away from all of those musical forms.

Maybe there is no next thing! Perhaps music will have to, and in fact already is, starting to learn that the art form itself has now reached a point, not terribly different from fashion, where all it can do... is reinterpret the past in a way as to make it relevant for the current consumer. What do I mean? Well, I don't claim to understand fashion like a fashionista or even close, but I think it's fair to say that there really aren't any more pants being invented. There's that and the human form isn't changing terribly - we aren't growing extra feet or heads so as to require new garments heretofore unimagined. No, we're pretty much stuck with ourselves as we are. And what does that really give fashion a chance to do? Not all that much when you get right down to it. They're at a point where they try something that hasn't been done for a while and see if it'll work with today's sensibilities. Hem lines go up and down... Ties get fat and skinny... It's almost a game they play for themselves while pumping out enough stuff for the masses to pay for their indulgences. Music already has lots of insular folks playing and trying to out-do each other at forms the general public could care less about. That's clearly not the answer either, but I think something along the lines of fashion, without the inward looking aspect, could be what music has lost and could lead to quite a renaissance.

So what would that sound like?

Well, I'm willing to accept the "terrible truth" that we've run out of notes. There's no getting around that. And I further understand that, like fashion, our job now will be to reinterpret what's happened before - that's the only originality really left - having the cultural awareness to be able to match up the zeitgeist of the moment with something from the past. If you do that right you can be relevant and impactful... to all sorts of people, not just an insular club... and it doesn't mean you have to sell out! Is there anybody doing that? Yeah, I do see little vestiges of what I'm talking about starting to take place. I hear techo/chillout/electronic music people that have another life as somewhat serious composers and the stuff they're writing (sometimes referred to as "classical crossover" by an industry to trying to figure out what the hell is going on) is tonal. It has more in common with Schumann and Chopin than it does with anything Schoenberg ever did.

I'm in the midst of writing a ton of new stuff and this direction is what I find hitting me - it's what I'm hearing and what I want to do. It's extremely simple and tonal but I think also effective. It borrows all sorts of modern techniques and wraps them around the simplest of forms. Although I refer it to as simple - and it is in many ways - I think it also reflects a world living in an information glut. The music can borrow from everything and everywhere because... we're all already doing that anyway. I also feel that tonal hits people in a way that nothing else really does - there's still a part of ourselves, that even today yearns for the romantic in the sense of Beethoven and Brahms - we hear that approach and innately feel it has a certain truth - and that's music at its most powerful. I've long since left the game of being a prognosticator, but I increasingly feel this is the inevitable direction it's all going to go and, on the whole, I think it's good news.