Expanding the Commons

i'm persuaded. The term tonality adds little to our theoretical discourse and brings with it a troubling history; we lose little and gain much if we abandon it as an umbrella concept for a range of musical phenomena better theorized à la carte. I'd like to pause over this balance of loss to gain at the outset, as readers of Yust's provocative essay may worry that they are being asked to give up too much. I do not want to downplay the vertigo that some may feel when considering life without tonality—I feel it too. Our curricula are structured around the word, as Yust observes, and it has acted as a kind of intellectual commons for generations of theorists. But I think Yust is right: losing the word doesn't mean we lose the theoretical insights gained under its banner. Nor does it mean we lose the commons. Indeed, as I will argue at the end of this response, moving on from the term offers us an opportunity to reimagine and reconstitute that commons as a more inclusive space, socially and musically. In the process, we also stand to gain much else: ethical clarity, sharper thinking, a nimbler analytical method, and the ability to engage a far greater range of the world's musics in our classes and research. If the cost of these gains is giving up an unwieldy term that was never that well defined in the first place, I'm happy to pay it.This is a different position from the one I took some years ago in my book Tonality and Transformation. I noted in the opening pages that the first word in the book's title, in addition to being definitionally vague, has acquired a considerable amount of ideological freight over its relatively short life, making it not merely a descriptive label for a musical repertory or a set of aural habits, but a concept that has served a variety of ideological interests. (Rings 2011: 2)1The footnote that follows this statement (n. 8) mentions Fétis's racism—via Brian Hyer's discussion in his landmark Grove article on "Tonality," reprinted in The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory—as well as Kofi Agawu's writing on tonality's role as a colonizing force in Africa (Hyer 2002; Agawu 2003).2 I went on: "Given the word's ideological charge and its lack of semantic focus, it might be tempting to jettison it altogether, perhaps replacing it with a more neutral neologism. But to do so would be overly fastidious. Despite its many problems, the word tonality continues to evoke a vivid sound world for many Western listeners" (Rings 2011: 3).3 What struck me as "overly fastidious" a dozen years ago I now find a bold but defensible response to a genuinely vexing issue. Moreover, Yust's bracing article has convinced me that we can continue to engage the "sound world"—or better, "sound worlds"—in question without any need for tonality as a covering term. Indeed, losing the word could well make us more responsive to the sonic effects of the many musics that enter our ears on the regular.Of course, changing a word won't solve all of our problems, nor does Yust claim it would. Structural racism and music theory's white racial frame are rooted deep in our institutions and in our disciplinary practices, as Philip Ewell (2020, 2023) has argued. Genuine change will occur only through sustained effort on multiple fronts. The recent issue of Music Theory Spectrum, which includes Stephen Lett's (2023) essay "Making a Home for the Society for Music Theory, Inc.," as well as eight responses to it, makes clear that such work, though incipient, is underway. Changing our theoretical language won't accomplish that alone, but it may move the needle. For, as Yust shows, language's effects quickly become reified in our curricula and syllabi—witness the bifurcation between tonal and post-tonal courses with which he begins. As long as those remain our two master categories for music analysis classes, we should not be surprised if the lion's share of the music we teach continues to come from the European classical tradition. To be sure, Anglo-American popular music has gradually found its way into many harmony classrooms, but only rarely do musics from non-Western traditions receive similar attention.4 To be sure, the word tonality is hardly to blame for all of this. But it hasn't helped.For our language, unexamined, can push us around. It routes our thought in certain directions rather than others, at times bringing with it histories that we may find loathsome. This is how I interpret Yust's central argument that tonality's racist foundations are perpetuated by a basic definitional incoherence. Is tonality a label for a set of aural properties or for a historically (and racially) delimited repertory? As theorists we tend to shuttle almost imperceptibly between these two definitions in the daily rough and tumble of music talk.5 This might not be a problem were it not that the historical definition all too often acts to segregate music, with the classical European common practice (unsurprisingly) emerging triumphant. It sits atop of the tonal heap, all other ostensibly tonal musics—from Duke Ellington to Taylor Swift—strewn about on its slopes, as more or less remote declensions from Mozart. It is easy enough to shake our heads at such blinkered Eurocentrism and vow to do better. It is harder to bring awareness to the many small ways we continue to enact it in statements like, "Music x sounds pretty tonal, I suppose, but the harmony isn't functional"; or "I guess music y is tonal, but the voice leading is loaded with bad parallels." Such seemingly innocuous comments quietly smuggle tonality's elite, Eurocentric biases back into our thinking and teaching, even—perhaps especially—when we are filling our ears with nonclassical music.Philip Tagg, whom Yust does not cite, has written forcefully and eloquently on this matter. Tagg is a theorist sui generis and an old-school Marxist who has been blazing his own trail in the study of popular music for five decades (British by birth, he has taught extensively in Sweden, the UK, and francophone Montreal). In his Everyday Tonality II: Towards a Tonal Theory of What Most People Hear, he bemoans the Eurocentrism of traditional accounts of tonality, offering his book as a corrective that expands the term's reach to nearly all of the world's musics, with a strong emphasis on the vernacular (Tagg 2023). In his account, the European common practice is merely one tonal practice among many others, and by no means typical.6 He advances his argument in part by some definitional play: he suggests that we reserve the word tonal for any music that contains tones. For musics that contain tonics, he proposes the term tonical. Tagg's fondness for neologisms is endearing, but I doubt tonicality will catch on anytime soon. Nor would it likely help, as I can imagine us quickly concluding that Mozart is—lo and behold!—more tonical than other musics, thus leaving us more or less where we began (same heap, new label). And if all music that contains tones is tonal, the adjective—or its nominative form, tonality—becomes so broad as to become virtually useless. None of which is to diminish the practical value of Tagg's work, which is considerable. His book presents a flexible analytical method that engages diverse musics—vernacular and elite, Western and non-Western, from the Global South to the Northern Metropole, Hijaz to Lynyrd Skynyrd—with admirable agility. Indeed, I used the book as the principal text in my most recent graduate class on tonal analysis, about which, more below.Other authors have sought to broaden the definition of tonality historically and/or generically; Yust cites Megan Long (2020), Daniel Harrison (2016), and Dmitri Tymoczko (2023) as three recent examples. This work is invaluable, as are these authors' efforts to smudge the boundaries of tonality at the edges of the common practice. But I agree with Yust that such work often has to struggle against ingrained habits of thought about tonality (traditionally conceived) and the attendant oppositions that fortify its historical and generic perimeters: tonality vs. modality, tonality vs. atonality, common-practice tonality vs. rock tonality, and so on. If we lose the term, such struggles evaporate. We no longer need to map the precise historical dateline that separates modality from tonality, for example, or fret over the differences between voice-leading in a Motown tune and in a Bach chorale. Tonality and Transformation arose from frustrations around a similar demarcation line: that between common-practice tonality and what some have called "triadic post-tonality" (see, e.g., Straus 2016). Though I retained the term tonality, in retrospect I wonder if it was more of an encumbrance than a help. For in discussions around neo-Riemannian theory the concept all too often led to binaristic distinctions—"Is this piece/phrase/passage tonal or not?" Such questions, by my lights, distracted from the many fascinating ways that tonal effects were bent and refracted in such music.7Let's try theoretical life without such unproductive binaries. I suspect we would find the experience liberating. In what remains of my response I would like to explore one reason for this, amplifying an aspect of Yust's essay that seems especially promising. This is his component-wise account of different musical parameters that contribute to a sense of tonalness. As he states, "the word tonality is used to refer to many different features of music, all of which have other names, and there is little downside in using more precise terms" (p. 66). He proposes six broad categories that we can theorize independently: (1) Key(2) Tonic or tonal center(3) Scales and macroharmony(4) Scale degree(5) Triadic harmony and consonance(6) Functional harmonyIt's a somewhat unruly bunch, given that the categories have different degrees of complexity or hierarchical layering. Some categories, like scale degrees and scales/macroharmony, are relatively simple, either involving atoms of musical structure (scale degrees) or sets of such atoms (scales and macroharmony). Others are more elaborate. Key, for example, is an emergent effect of the coordination of various of the other parameters, likely including tonics, scales, scale degrees, and (in some styles) functional harmony. It also may well involve some items not on Yust's list such as phrase rhythm, coordination of harmony and meter, cadence, texture, repetition, and outer-voice counterpoint. As this list already suggests, key is also one of the parameters still quite susceptible to a classical, Eurocentric bias. Yust addresses this by referring explicitly to the major-minor key system, but I wonder if we might broaden our sense of key to be less Eurocentric. Does the concept hold up in musics that do not admit of understanding in the major-minor system? If so, how much would it rely on the other categories for definition? Does a sense of key, for example, necessarily assume a tonic? Does it require a circumscribed scalar vocabulary, or slow-moving macroharmony? Do keys presume a predominantly triadic chordal vocabulary? Could one, for example, project a sense of key with only McCoy Tyner–style quartal harmonies? Put otherwise, what is the status of key in much of A Love Supreme? At what point does attenuating some or all of these elements also attenuate one's sense of key? And how much is this an emic/etic matter? That is, do practitioners within a given musical style answer these questions differently than analysts who are cultural outsiders? What kinds of vernacular music theories have musicians within these traditions developed to understand the sounds they make?8 I raise these questions not as objections, quite the contrary. These are all fascinating issues opened up by Yust's component-wise reframing. Each question is an invitation to expand the commons.On reading Yust's discussion I was reminded of the graduate tonal analysis class I taught in the winter of 2022, mentioned above. In that class, I indeed tried out such a component-wise, parametric approach to analyzing a wide range of tonal musics, from Delta Blues to Tin Pan Alley, Nina Simone to (yes) Mozart. My working hypothesis for the class was that we can productively engage with such a diversity of tonal musics if we consider each practice as a special configuration of some familiar tonal categories. I provided a list in the syllabus, which has some overlap with Yust's, and the same unruliness. I tried to provide some order, though, by dividing the entries into three categories: Materials (out of time) ScalesChordsKeysTonicsSyntax (in time) Phrase rhythmCoordination of harmony, melody, and meterVoice-leading, especially bass-melody skeletonsCadence or other conventional means of punctuation/caesura/closureRegulating concepts (both) HierarchyAsymmetryConsonance/dissonanceDeparture/returnRepetitionI proposed that the class begin by visualizing a mixing board and consider each of these parameters as a slider. My wager was that different tonal idioms would position the sliders in different configurations. For example, one idiom might have plenty of diatonic scales and triads but provide a weak sense of key and tonic; another might have really clear phrase rhythm but place very little emphasis on outer-voice counterpoint; a third style might lean hard on an opposition between consonance and dissonance, while another might blur that distinction so much as to make it all but meaningless. And so on. In each case we could imagine the sliders maxed out, somewhere in the middle, or drawn all the way down to silence. I suspected that our sense of the tonalness of some bit of music was related to these slider configurations. I further had a hunch that the drawing down of several sliders to zero or near zero would place pressure on other sliders to max out—for example, if the music has a weak sense of key or tonic, it'll need some strong sonic markers of tonalness in its chordal and scalar vocabulary if we are still to hear it as, to some degree, tonal. This still raises the question of what I mean by the word tonal, and whether the concept is ultimately still dependent on sonic similarity to the European common practice, and hence to tonality. It's hard to escape the gravitational pull of these familiar terms. But Tagg's book shows that there is still much one can say about the tonal effects of the world's musics within a more hierarchically flattened conception that does not privilege elite European art music.9 As analytical work continues to emerge on the many musics of the world, our corpus for understanding the diversity of such tonal effects will only grow.10Before closing, it is worth pointing out one serious shortcoming of the above discussion, and of Yust's essay: the relentless focus on pitch. Of course, any discussion of tonality (or its abandonment) will give pitch pride of place. But pitch myopia is a familiar problem for music theorists; if we pin our hopes on renovating our thinking about pitch systems, a great many crucial aspects of the world's musics will continue to slip through our fingers. Timbre is the most obvious overlooked parameter, but gesture, texture, articulation, intensity, interaction, and simple volume are also nearby. Here my thinking is influenced in large part by the music of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (or AACM), which I have been teaching much in recent years, and which is the subject of Paul Steinbeck's recent book, Sound Experiments (see my review in this issue). When analyzing this music, I'm often struck by the conceptual inadequacy of that basic music-theoretical particle, the "note."11 Notes, as abstractions, are bearers of quantifiable information on pitch and rhythm, the very things conventional music theory is best at modeling. But much of the AACM's music—especially in its improvisational sections using "little instruments"—arguably trades not in notes at all but sounds of varying sizes, textures, and tactilities. The title of Roscoe Mitchell's first album, Sound, says as much.12 Much other music from the Black radical tradition—here I think in particular of Albert Ayler and players influenced by him—similarly gives timbre the central role. While old habits of thought often treat timbre as a kind of decorative color for the "real" syntactical substance of pitch, I often feel that these priorities are reversed in Ayler: it is pitch that colors timbre. Change the pitches and not much is lost; change the timbre and everything is. The putative secondary parameter becomes primary.13 If we wish to expand our theoretical horizons to encompass more of the world's musics, we will need to venture forth more regularly from the well-mapped coordinate spaces of our pitch systems, tonal or otherwise.This reflects a call that many have made, over generations, to broaden what we theorize.14 So if you're nodding in agreement, let's wonder together again why we still get so stuck on pitch. I think it is in part because pitch itself is a commons. It constitutes a space of encounter and social negotiation. (Think of any performance of "Happy Birthday.") Where timbre distinguishes bodies,15 those same bodies can share pitch. Pitch is a musical agora in which our distinct timbres can sound together. This is one source of music's efficacy, as well as its progressive potential, whether participants share pitch in worship (gospel musicians "tuning up") (see Shelley 2021) or in protest (BLM marchers singing Kendrick Lamar's "Alright"). In this spirit, I'm very taken by Yust's comments about the social aspects of tonality: "From the beginning . . . , tonality has been a concept that requires the context of a community of listeners. The concept is communicative, and thereby predicated on a shared cultural code between producer and receiver of music. This implies that each distinct musical culture must have its own way for music to be tonal" (p. 67)This turn toward the social—indeed, toward a relational model of musical practices—is perhaps the most salutary effect of rethinking our theories of pitch. That pitch systems are social systems is not exactly news—ask the nearest ethnomusicologist or Adornian. But music theorists have been slower to the insight. The more seriously we take it—that is, the more rigorously we theorize pitch relations and/as human relations—the more quickly we may find that we are already dismantling Yust's rickety perimeter fence around the theoretical commons. When seeking our bearings outside that hermetic enclosure, a rigorously relational turn may well act as an orienting point, a guiding star. Maybe even a new disciplinary tonic.