D. Tymoczko – A Geometry of Music

Автор: D. Tymoczko
Название книги: A Geometry of Music
Формат: PDF
Жанр: Музыка
Качество: Изначально компьютерное, E-book

When I was about 15 years old, I decided I wanted to be a composer, rather than a
physicist or mathematician. I had recently switched from classical piano to electric
guitar, and although I exhibited no obvious signs of compositional talent, I was fascinated
by the amazing variety of twentieth-century music: the suavely ferocious Rite of
Spring, which made tubas sound cool; the encyclopedic Sgt. Pepper, which contained
multitudes; the hypnotic repetitions of Philip Glass, whose spirit seemed also to infuse
the music of Brian Eno and Robert Fripp; and the geeky sophistication of art rock
and new wave. I was aware of but intimidated by jazz, which seemed to be perpetually
beyond reach, like the gold at the end of a rainbow. (Told by my guitar teacher that
certain chords or scales were jazzy, I would inevitably fi nd that they sounded fl at and
lifeless in my hands.) To a kid growing up in a college town in the 1980s, the musical
world seemed wide open: you could play The Rite of Spring with your rock band, write
symphonies for electric guitars, or do anything else you might imagine.
I was somewhat surprised, therefore, to fi nd that my college teachers—famous
academics and composers—inhabited an entirely different musical universe. They
knew nothing about, and cared little for, the music I had grown up with. Instead,
their world revolved around the dissonant, cerebral music of Arnold Schoenberg and
his followers. As I quickly learned, in this environment not everything was possible:
tonality was considered passé and “unserious”; electric guitars and saxophones were
not to be mixed with violins and pianos; and success was judged by criteria I could
not immediately fathom. Music, it seemed, was not so much to be composed as constructed—
assembled painstakingly, note by note, according to complicated artifi cial
systems. Questions like “does this chord sound good?” or “does this compositional
system produce likeable music?” were frowned upon as naive or even incoherent.
I studied many things in college: seventeenth-century masses, eighteenth- century
Lutheran chorales, and twentieth-century avant-garde music. I learned about
Heinrich Schenker, who purported to reduce all good tonal pieces to a small number
of basic templates. I absorbed mathematical tools for constructing and deconstructing
atonal compositions. But I did not learn anything whatsoever about jazz,
Debussy, Ravel, Shostakovich, Messiaen, or minimalism. In fact, even the music of
Wagner and Chopin was treated with a certain embarrassment—acknowledged to be
important, but deemed suspiciously illogical in its construction. Looking back, I can
see that the music I encountered was the music my teachers knew how to talk about.
Unfortunately, this was not the music I had come to college wanting to understand.
Twenty years later, things are different, and a number of the barriers between musical
styles have fallen. Many composers have returned to the tonal ideas that my own
teachers deemed irrelevant. Electric guitars now mix freely with violins, and everything
is indeed permitted. But despite this new freedom, tonality remains poorly understood.
We lack even the most rudimentary sense of the musical ingredients that contribute
to the sense of “tonalness.” The chromatic music of the late nineteenth century
continues to be shrouded in mystery. We have no systematic vocabulary for discussing
Debussy’s early 20th-century music or its relation to subsequent styles. Graduate students
in music often know nothing about bebop, or about how this language relates
backward to classical music and forward to contemporary concert music. As a result,
many young musicians are essentially fl ying by the seat of their pants, rediscovering for
themselves the basic techniques of modern tonal composition.
The goal of this book is to understand tonality afresh—to provide some new theoretical
tools for thinking about tonal coherence, and to illuminate some of the hidden
roads connecting modern tonality to that of the past. My aim is to retell the history
of Western music so that twentieth-century tonality appears not as an aberration, the
atavistic remnant of an exhausted tradition, but as a vital continuation of what came
before. I hope that this effort will be useful to composers who want new ways to write
tonal pieces, as well as to theorists, performers, and analysts who are looking for new
ways to think about existing music.
While my primary audience consists of composers and music theorists, I have
tried to write in a way that is accessible to students and dedicated amateurs: technical
terms are explained along the way, and only a basic familiarity with elementary music
theory (including Roman numeral analysis) is presumed. (Specialists will therefore
need to endure the occasional review of music-theoretical basics, particularly in the
early chapters.) More than anything else, I have attempted to write the sort of book
I wish had existed back when I fi rst began to study music. It would make me happy
to think that these ideas will be helpful to some young musician, brimming with
excitement over the world of musical possibilities, eager to understand how classical
music, jazz, and rock all fi t together—and raring to make some new contribution to
musical culture.