Modality and Death as Racism

"i love tonality!"During my undergraduate years, this was something I gushed to at least two of my professors on different occasions, during brief precious moments of one-on-one time with them. What exactly did I mean by this exclamation, and why did I feel so strong a need to make it that I made it more than once? To some degree, I was saying it because it was simply true—my undergraduate years were a period of headily exciting discovery about the wonders of the eighteenth-century European classical tonal system and the Great Works that monumentalized it.1 I spent entire afternoons in those days at the keyboard just blissed out on the ii chord and marveling at its ii-chord-ness (not even the iiø7, not even the Neapolitan, not even the V/V—just the regular old diatonic ii chord). All the same, there was inevitably a performative aspect to my saying this too: some of me was sure that making my enthusiasm evident not only in deed but also in word would make my professors more certain that I was actually truly very into the things they were teaching—that I was studying the tonal principles laid out in their classes not because I had to, but because I wanted to—that I was the right kind of student.This performativity is made quite clear by the very different feeling that overcame me during a different interaction with a professor, which went something like this: Professor: It's great that you like the high-culture music of Europe so much. I'm curious, what other music do you enjoy?Me: I . . . uh . . . well, there's this, er, I guess, this kind of, well, Japanese genre, you see, called um, enka . . .Professor: Oh OK. What does it sound like? Can you sing some to me?Me:(sings a verse of Misora Hibari's "Kanashii sake," very timidly and much too quietly)Professor: Thanks, that's interesting.Me: Anyway though, about those Mozart piano concerti, let me reaffirm my enthusiasm . . .It would be many more years—not until mid-PhD-program, really—that I began to consciously face the instinctive sense of shame that would cover my being whenever I had to admit in any non-home situation that I liked enka and certain flavors of J-pop about as much as I liked Mozart and Beethoven. And many of the reasons that I felt that shame, despite the ease with which I could announce my love for European classical music, should be evident enough to any reader of the Journal of Music Theory from our current time period. But these feelings went deeper too, in a way that connects directly to Jason Yust's article on tonality and racism, and so I hope the reader will indulge me a moment more of personal reflection.Feelings of shame around exposing my love for Japanese popular music around my "academic music crowd" were not tied exclusively to social situations—I had built up a great deal of my own self-concept around the idea of tonality, even when utterly alone and free to listen to as much enka as I wanted to. But most enka is, by almost anyone's estimation, extremely tonal—if the object of my worship was simply tonality, rather than something more disturbing, why should I be ashamed to love enka publicly? My rationalization went something like this: I can't tell my colleagues about my love for enka, because they don't know that it's Good Tonal Music and will assume it's not. But I know myself that it is Good Tonal Music, so it's still OK for me to like it, privately. Wow, what a great functional leading tone that was! This worked great for enka that had functional leading tones. For example, what holes could anyone rightly poke in the idea of Ishikawa Sayuri's "Tsugaru Kaikyō: Fuyugeshiki" (see Example 1) being tonal?Every year in Japan ends with Kōhaku uta gassen 紅白歌合戦, a marathon song contest broadcast on NHK; and every odd-numbered year since 2007, Ishikawa's performance of "Tsugaru Kaikyō" at Kōhaku reminds us afresh of the song's aggressively functional V7–i cadential logic. Thanks in part to that biennial ritual, I was able to get my continuous fill of the idea that enka was Good Tonal Music, even if its set of chords was rather small—it did nearly the same things with chords that the composers I was publicly proud to enjoy did with chords.But what about at the ends of even-numbered years? On those occasions, Ishikawa instead sings "Amagi-goe," which makes its cadential progressions as shown in Example 2.This was, according to everything I had learned in books and in school, the wrong kind of tonal, if it could even be admitted to the "tonal" label at all. How could I internally deal with something like this? How dare I enjoy a final cadence like this? For a while, I simply ignored the question, or perhaps pretended to like it slightly less. But the more my academic research zeroed in on the question of what exactly a "tonic" was, the less I could keep ignoring this question. And soon enough, I found myself concluding things a lot like what Jason Yust is arguing in this issue of JMT: that there are serious and racist issues deep at the roots of the tonality I so love, so much that it had been preventing me from even fully letting myself love a lot of the music I love.Though I am broadly in agreement with Yust about the problems with the work that tonal and tonality have been involved with, my own work led me toward more upset with tonal's frequent opposite: modal. What is "modal music"? To riff on Tymoczko's proposal of defining tonal as simply "not atonal,"2 one common consensus around modal seems to be that modal music is anything that is neither tonal nor atonal—a vast world-encircling bucket into which medieval chant, Renaissance polyphony, Sacred Harp music, later jazz, most rock, and every kind of non-Europe-originating music on Earth all get tossed. It is easy to find this definition online—for instance, the site italianpiano.com puts ancient Greek music, Gregorian chant, "much African music," modal jazz, and psychedelic rock, into the "modal music" category, alongside declaring that "modal music is less sophisticated than tonal music."3 The website of the ear-training software program Earmaster does much the same, splitting all music into the three categories of "tonal, atonal, and modal," and describing medieval European music, Indian classical music, and "many Non-Western traditions" as "modal."4 According to the site Fiddle Hangout, the use of the subtonic rather than the leading tone in "Amagi-goe" would be enough to sort it under the "modal" label.5 Though it is easiest to find these sorts of declarations in nonacademic sources, I would contend that the way of thought indexed by them lives in the heads of all of us JMT readers as well—and that it is simply the flipside of the problems Yust has identified with tonal.Opposite the near-meaningless breadth of modal, the biggest problem with tonal is that it has become too narrow. Specifically, it has long been strictly the focal point of a grand narrative—one that Yust addresses often, though I'd argue that he could stand to marginalize it more. In my own years as an undergraduate, I, like many generations of American music students, studied from Stephen Kostka and Dorothy Payne's textbook Tonal Harmony.6 And even in those early days, I found myself bothered by the following statement in its "to the student" opener, which is still present at least in the eighth edition (2018): Tonal harmony is not limited to the period 1650–1900. It began evolving long before 1650, and it is still around today. Turn on your radio, go to a club, listen to the canned music in the supermarket—it's almost all tonal harmony. So why do we put the demise of tonal harmony at 1900? Because from about that time, most composers of "serious," or "legitimate," or "concert" music have been more interested in post-tonal harmony than in tonal harmony. This does not mean that tonal harmony ceased to exist in the real world or in music of artistic merit. (xv)Here Kostka and Payne are trying their best to thread an unthreadable needle: they don't want to assert that tonal modern popular music is nonexistent, or that it is qualitatively or morally bad, and they're careful to put "serious," "legitimate," and "concert" in scare quotes to distance themselves from charges of elitism. But then if they don't believe in those categories, why reproduce them by saying that "we put the demise of tonal harmony at 1900"? Why reinforce a narrative whose ideological implications they can't support? To return to Ishikawa Sayuri's enka songs, I might have felt a little more comfortable with "Tsugaru Kaikyō" than with "Amagi-goe" because of its leading tones and its acceptable melody-bass counterpoint—but I knew that both songs, as ones written in the 1970s or 1980s, long after the "death" of tonality, were not to be seen as "serious" by the view of history presented by Kostka and Payne.7 To answer my own question and to exonerate Kostka and Payne a bit, they wrote what they did because they found themselves constrained by contradictory cultural forces: one force insisted that music outside the grand classical narrative was just fine, while the other continued to insist that it was not.Here then is perhaps where I differ most from Yust: I'd argue that while tonal has been used badly, it might not itself be bad (though much rehabilitation and care is needed). Pre-tonal and post-tonal, on the other hand, are inescapably bad and should be retired. Just about everything that is wrong with "tonal" has to do with the way it has been narrativized as something with a beginning and, more perniciously, an ending—a narrativization process that began, after all, with Fétis' ordres. This narrative has not already gone without recent critique in our discipline8—we've come a long way already—but it is still very much alive, and the racist problems Yust observes lie more with that narrative than with tonality itself. Pre-tonal inescapably disposes us toward seeing earlier music as "almost there but not quite," characterizing it as "still primitively modal like all the not-white stuff"; and post-tonal inescapably suggests that any post-1910 tonal music is somehow passé, uninteresting, and behind the times. Both these types of music are, as Yust suggests, easy to define in other terms—we could say that seventeenth-century composers became interested in a newly vertical and keyboard-based concept of harmony,9 and that some late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century composers became interested in rejecting traditional techniques of defining pitch centricity.This latter item especially is important to reframe, and is one of the areas on which Yust could have gone further: while he acknowledges that the major/minor key system "appears to have sustained its death throes clear to the present day," he also mentions the "dissolution" and the "abandonment of the major/minor key system and functional harmony," which ultimately stay rather close to the old narrative, even if the accompanying alternatives that Yust presents are an improvement. I entirely agree with Yust's dissatisfaction with the way "a tonal theory course may peter out somewhere around Wagner, and a post-tonal one, if it exists, will pick up immediately with the Second Viennese School," leaving out all of the post-Wagner tonal music—but I would disagree with that same paragraph's ending statement, about that analysis being inhibited by the concept of tonality. Rather, that inhibition seems to be entirely the fault of the concept of the death of tonality, since the music in question is all "too late." If the idea of "post-tonal" music could be deleted from every brain, there would no longer be the conundrum of "post-tonal tonal music" to contend with. This would remove most of the racist grounding of tonality, for the simple reason that most nonwhite people didn't start using something resembling European tonality until around the time that it was supposed to have died. The death narrative inevitably presents white Europeans as trailblazers, and everyone else as boring followers. Cut out the idea that tonal harmony (and the major/minor system, and functional harmony) ever had anything like a death, and the picture already looks a lot less racist.My other point of hesitation has to do with the following metaphor by Yust: When I look at tonality, I don't see shelter. What I do find are lots of other buildings—tonal center, major/minor key system, functional harmony—which are themselves of sound construction, and a slap-dash fence of historicism and parochialism around them. . . . The fence serves no purpose. It was built by someone long ago to designate certain homes as being of high status, but there no longer is any real difference in status, and now the fence has just been left there. Nothing is lost by simply kicking it aside. (81)While I do think that there is some sense to this metaphor, I'm not convinced that the buildings inside the fence are all of sound construction either. Some come very close to being simply the fence again, at least in the ways they tend to be used. Key, tonic, and major/minor system are often treated as almost entirely coterminous with tonal, and this is where modal comes back in. Returning to Ishikawa Sayuri's two enka songs excerpted above, I cannot imagine that anyone would have a problem with calling the opening V7 chord of "Tsugaru Kaikyō" a functional dominant, with saying that it is in the key of A minor, or with saying overall that it is tonal music. But simply because "Amagi-goe" resembles eighteenth-century minor-mode music less, there would probably be a lot less easy consensus on choosing the right terms when talking about it, including perhaps offering it the dreaded "modal" label. To whatever degree the term tonal is a dilapidated fence and a poison pill, as Yust argues, all of its related terms are dangerously close to the same dilapidated poison. Kicking tonal aside but keeping all closely related terms relatively unchanged will keep most of the same fence in place. If tonal has to go, all of its companions might have to as well.I, however, am not actually endorsing that idea. Overall, I have found tentative success and satisfaction with some version of the "plurality of tonalities" idea that Yust fears could mark a regression to Fétis's ordres. Yust brings up the very fair danger that talking in terms of "tonality," no matter how much we try to pull it away from Fétis's racist use of it, still "holds up whiteness as an absolute and standard against which nonwhite music must be judged" (68). This is true enough and should be resisted at every turn, but much the same is true of many of the terms Yust wants to replace it with—can major/minor key system and functional harmony avoid a privileging of whiteness any more than tonality can? I see no reason why they'd be able to—they all center the same European classical style and make similar implicit assumptions.My preferred solution, rather than for moving from one word to some others, is just to be very specific all the time. It may be tiresome to say and hear "eighteenth-century Austro-German classical tonality" so many times. But for one thing, one need say it only once per article, if it is an article that deals with only one kind of tonality—and more importantly, we simply inhabit a time that demands that sort of verbiage, for better or for worse (and I think it is far for the better). It's a minor sacrifice for the big payoff of getting to—or at least trying to—learn how to discuss many different types of music in a way that doesn't hold one to be better or more normal than others. Right now, our field is in motion and trying to figure out what it is—inevitably, the terms we use are going to be a bit messy and hard to keep a handle on. My general proposition is to embrace the large-scale mess while keeping individual pieces of analysis as clear as possible, even if that means using a few more explicit adjectives than we may be used to.In that context, when discussing the way pitch is used in "Amagi-goe," for example, it seems that Yust and I would agree that "Is it tonal?" is not a helpful or interesting question, and that there are many better questions that can be asked about it with that unnecessary one out of the way. But "How is it tonal?" can be an interesting question, and one that can point toward a world that centers whiteness less, rather than more.