Jean-Pierre Vial
January 2021
This article brings together some nonconformist considerations regarding tonality in Western classical music.
It analyzes the musical elements that determine both the tonality and the mode of a piece or, more often, locally, of a musical phrase.
The article comes with musical excerpts that you can click to listen to the corresponding sound example.
The musical excerpts shown in this article are represented by the conventional musical notation based on staves, notes and alterations (sharps, flats, etc.) whose sole purpose here is to represent a sound example.
Contrary to what many treatises on music theory do, in no way should the representation of a musical excerpt on a staff be used here to determine the key. It would be too easy to deduce, from a staff whose key signature includes two sharps, that the key sought is D major or B minor.
In this article, musical notation based on staves, notes and alterations should rather be considered as the result of a musical dictation that determines the note pitches and, according to the musical intervals heard, the tonality of the phrase.
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Jean-Pierre Vial January 2021 |
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