1 - Common-tone tonality

Summary

INTRODUCTION

As we enter the twenty-first century, the chromatic music of the nineteenth century continues to provide a fascinating and elusive subject for formal theoretical explanation. Most of our prevailing analytic models and methods, predicated on eighteenth-century practice, have traditionally explained chromatic music as the elaboration of diatonic structures. The music's frequent lack of conformity with these models has often been interpreted as a sign of weakness or inferiority in the music itself rather than due to any inappropriateness of the model. Of late, the orthodoxies of past decades have given way to freer speculation. Nineteenth-century chromatic tonality as a theoretical entity is developing an identity of its own, distinct from earlier models, and is attaining the status of a separate system or group of evolved systems. A renewed interest in the theory of chord relations is fueling the speculative fires.

One such comprehensive idea, recently suggested, envisions a chromatic harmonic space in which all twelve triads of the tonal system are equally available as tonics within a piece. This space recalls Schoenberg's theory of monotonality and intuitively invokes the image of later nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century chromatic music. It also provides a conceptual framework for recent analytic approaches which posit more than one tonic in a piece and treat works which begin in one key and end in another, and allows for straightforward consideration of high-level structural relationships other than traditional diatonic ones.