What's in a Name?

having recently written a book on the earliest conceptions of tonality in the nineteenth century, I take an interest in—and perhaps some responsibility for—Jason Yust's essay in this issue (Christensen 2019). In fact, both he as well as Philip Ewell (2023) have generously cited my book as a source that has helped stimulate their reflections on the problematic legacy of "tonality" and what it may contribute to the current debate concerning the "white frame" of music theory. But it never occurred to me that one follow-up to this much-needed reflection would be a recommendation to "[drop] the term from our theoretical lexicon." I would like to explain here why I think such a proposal is unwarranted, and indeed even counterproductive.Tonality, Yust tells us at the start of his essay, is a contaminated concept due to its entanglement "with a major intellectual project of nineteenth-century Europe, the pseudoscientific defense of colonialism and white supremacy." Our continued use of this term, he warns, "serves to perpetuate the racist origins of the term" and thereby "to delegitimize nonwhite music in our institutions." Indeed, it turns out that this "has been the agenda all along."1These are serious charges to lay on a single word, and we should want to know how that happened. What or who was the cause of this terminological sabotage? The short story, as we soon learn, begins with a nineteenth-century Belgian musicologist who was most responsible for promoting the notion of tonality in the first place: François-Joseph Fétis (1783–1871). Over the course of his long life and many writings, Fétis developed a radically racialized notion of tonality that soon infected all subsequent discourse regarding tonality. It became a "poison pill" that, according to Yust, we "have yet to flush from the system" (85).Now there is absolutely no denying that Fétis is indeed liable for injecting a racist venom into the concept of tonality, particularly in his final writings from the late 1860s. I don't need to document this in the present forum, as Yust gives us a sobering taste of Fétis's (1869) racist rhetoric by citing several excerpts from his final publication, the incomplete Histoire générale de la musique depuis les temps les plus anciens jusqu'à nos jours. In my own book on Fétis, I cite several more (Christensen 2019: 200–208). It all makes for shuddering reading and should disabuse anyone naive enough still to think music theory and analysis are somehow innocent enterprises that are insulated from any social, political, or institutional ideologies.Still, does this justify Yust's indictment that the term tonality had itself been so ineradicably corrupted by Fétis's racist discourse as to make its use by us today untenable? Does Fétis's "white-framing" of tonality necessarily pervert our understanding of tonality one hundred fifty years later whether we are aware of it or not? Yust's charges are serious, and they demand an equally serious reflection on our part. But if we are going to make a moral case for the expulsion of tonality as a legitimate concept from our music theoretical lexicon based on its tainted genealogy, we had better get that history right. So, without completely repeating a story that I have already laid out in some detail in my book, let me here simply reiterate a few relevant points.First, when Alexandre-Etienne Choron coined the term tonalité in 1810 (Choron and Fayolle 1810), it was to distinguish modern tonal practice (tonalité moderne) from an older modal practice found in medieval sacred chant (tonalité ecclésiastique or tonalité antique). And indeed, this is how Fétis applied the notion of tonality when he first appropriated Choron's term in his treatise on counterpoint from 1824, with the exception that he was trying to distinguish what we today call tonal counterpoint from modal counterpoint (Christensen 2019: 9). The origin of the term thus lay in a project of Choron and Fétis to understand the evolution of Western musical language over a long thousand-year durée from the Middle Ages to their own time. (Later Fétis claimed to have pinpointed the exact place and moment tonality transitioned to its modern form: it was in measure 11 of Monteverdi's madrigal "Cruda Amarilla" from 1605!) Fétis soon went on to subdivide modern tonality into three further periods of evolution that he called transitonic, pluritonic, and omnitonic, respectively.2 But there was still little attention at this point paid to music outside of Europe, if only for the very good reason that so little of this music was yet known. So, for Yust to suggest that the concept of tonalité was infected with a colonialist and racist virus from its inception is simply not correct. To be sure, it eventually would be in Fétis's subsequent writings. But in his first publications, that was a development that was neither immanent nor inevitable.Second, if Fétis's late racialization of tonality is a "poison pill" that he planted, where and how was it transmitted to our present day? It could not have been his notorious Histoire générale, for that was virtually a dead letter upon arrival, eclipsed almost immediately by the next wave of music histories that followed in quick succession, above all those by Ambros, Gevaert, Spitta, Westphal, and Aubry. While there is no denying that many of these later white male scholars betrayed to varying degrees their own biases of colonialist hubris and white cultural smugness in their writings, we need not credit nor blame Fétis for it. (There was plenty of that to be found in European scholarship at the time.) On the contrary, those few historians who seemed to have read Fétis's unfinished history were virtually unanimous in condemning it as an egregious mishmash of the shoddiest scholarship (Christensen 2019: 270–72). Such was the case for music critic and folklorist Julien Tiersot (1857–1936). Still, it is noteworthy that Tiersot adopted the word tonalité without hesitation in his later ethnographic writings, with the important difference being that he saw tonality not being something that separated peoples of the world but might well unite them given the preponderance of a heptatonic scale he observed to be a common denominator of world music (Christensen 2019: 210–11).Tiersot was hardly the only one to find the term tonalité appealing. So did countless others. Over the course of the nineteenth century, we find cognate adaptions into many European languages: German already in 1833 (Tonalität), English, Italian (tonalità), Spanish (tonalidad), and Russian (тональность). This is not even to mention its seepage into the disciplinary vocabularies of art history, psychology, linguistics, optics, and architecture. But as we inventory the ways tonality was invoked musically, we find a lexical cornucopia of meanings.3 (The plural I employed in my book's title was a reminder that there were multiple "stories of tonality" in the nineteenth century—and not just those of Fétis.) In fact, I have found very few music theorists who explicitly carried Fétis's racial torch forward in regard to tonality.4 Which is not to say, once again, there were none who expressed strong racial prejudice and doctrines of white (or more vocally, perhaps, German) cultural supremacy. We may think naturally of Schenker, though it should be noted that he rarely used the term Tonalität in his major trilogy of texts, no doubt associating it with the more systematic Harmonielehren taught in the conservatories against which he would wage continual war.5But Yust correctly reminds us that the harm tonality can cause as a music theoretical term may not be so apparent to those of us who habitually invoke it in our scholarship and teaching. If I understand Yust's argument accurately, its baleful trace can be most clearly seen in the ways we continue to "segregate repertoire and analytical tools" into "ethnic-historical box[es]," and "in which non-Europeans occupied the earlier stages in a process that culminated with contemporaneous white Europeans." Tonality, along with its modernist counter pole atonality, then become the final teleological stage of a tonal evolution that validates—and helps to insulate—white musical practice from any ethnic contamination.Now there are a number of things I could say in response here. I might point out, for example, that Fétis's own teleology of tonality was not necessarily an unmitigated triumph of white civilization. (He repeatedly would remind his readers that any such evolution was one of "transformation," but not of "progress.") As it turns out, the "omnitonic" music of the future that he prognosticated as the "final" stage in the evolution of European tonality was based on a phylogenetic model that he usually characterized by such attributes as overextension, exhaustion, infirmity, decadence, and decline (his colorful metaphors would frequently change) (Christensen 2019: 247). This was an ignominious transformation evident to his ears in the music of Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner.But is the evolutionary model of tonality bequeathed by Fétis at all a factor today? It is telling that Yust only cites two theorists from the first half of the twentieth century as spokespeople for this tradition (Schoenberg and Yassar). Today, when composers (or theorists for that matter) have at their fingertips and computer mouses access to an unimaginable multitude of global musical languages and sounds to draw from, the question Tonal oder atonal? Hardly seems to raise the existential anxiety it once did.Let me be clear. I do not doubt at all that our Western institutions of music today are burdened by severe legacies of racism and colonialism. But racism and colonialism have many tributaries in music, and it is unreasonable to single out tonality as a primary factor for transmitting this virus.6 At the same time, to say that striking the term tonality from our professional vocabulary will solve much of this problem is just too simplistic. Music theorists who know their history of theory will not need to be reminded that musical terminology can change radically over time, and the meaning a certain term had in its inception may have little to do with how it might have been understood or applied generations later.7This is not to say that Western tonality as a practice could not do violence when it was imposed by colonial and imperialist regimes, as Kofi Agawu (2016) has trenchantly reminded us regarding the case study of Africa. But that can hardly be blamed on the label that we affix to the music. To say otherwise is to invert the term as a semiotic signifier, not to mention being a prime example of the genetic fallacy. (A thought experiment: if there was no covering term like tonality known by the colonial and missionary music masters in Africa, would that have changed the kinds of Christian four-part hymns or military band music they would have brought with them and compelled local natives to sing and play?) Tonality as a word may possess totemic power to most professional music theorists. But for the vast majority of musicians, I dare say the word conjures up far less fearsome images. Think, for example, how often the term is used casually to designate a key (as in a "C Major tonality"); or perhaps as a synonym for timbre or sound quality.Yust does offer a slightly more pragmatic argument challenging the viability of tonality as a useful concept toward the middle of his essay that is not so much ethical as it is lexical. Tonality, he reminds us, has been used capaciously by music theorists and historians in a "universalist usage" to describe—and regulate—a huge swath of world music to the point that its meaning becomes incoherent. Thereby, it conflates more precise empirical and cognitive features that offer far more effective ways to describe and differentiate the varied historical practices, genres, and styles typically yoked together under the rubric of tonality. (He itemizes six specific such features in his essay.) When tonality is used in such a bloated way, it "impedes us from developing [these features] as fully realized theoretical concepts."But is this really news to most music theorists today? Aren't the music analyses of "tonal" music that most of us value those in which the analyst is careful to select and specify the criteria they find to be most revealing in a given work or repertoire, and to adapt their analytic method, terminology, and tools with appropriate precision to reveal those features? Certainly I would say that the authors of the recent analytic studies Yust cites in his essay dealing with liminal aspects of historical tonality do that scrupulously (e.g., Tymoczko 2011; Harrison 2016; Long 2020).8 But I would add this caveat: while I think most music analysts today are usually careful to specify how they understand tonality and what specific empirical and cognitive features seem salient in the music they might be concerned with, many of us also have a synthetic urge to draw connections across and between works if we observe them, to note correspondences, similarities, homologies, congruities, and familial resemblances. And we usually find it useful to give names to those connections using covering terms, conceptual categories, and group labels to bind those musical systems, models, repertories, styles, forms, types, schema, syntaxes, or genres (Blum 2023: 93). After all, isn't this what we usually mean by music theory? Oddly, at the very end of his essay, Yust seems to say much the same thing, holding out the belief that "universal principles of music [exist] across many far-flung musical traditions . . . waiting for us to see them." Why couldn't a carefully qualified and culturally sensitive theory of tonality do some of that job?• • • • •Today we can no longer overlook the abuse of the concept of tonalité by one of its original propagandists in the nineteenth century. And to the extent this story contributes to our current reckoning of the racial frames that are indeed part of our disciplinary history, it serves as a telling morality tale. But that sordid and sobering story, however shameful a stain it is in the history of our profession, is not and cannot be the complete story of tonality. I doubt there will be too many music theorists who will take up Yust's suggestion to drop the term in our teaching and scholarship, for the simple reason that it remains useful.9 We need a covering concept like tonality to help us connect some of those empirical features and cognitive attributes Yust has identified. Instead of being a monolithic box that suffocates those particularities it engulfs, we can use tonality as a kind of ideal Gestalt against which individual empirical features can be rubbed and toward which cognitive attributes signify. For good or for ill, the concept of tonality is deeply—and I would even say, inextricably—embedded in our disciplinary history as well as the warp and woof of our analytic language today. The responsible and realistic task before us now is not to take away words and hope it makes us think better; it is to first think better and then use our words carefully.