Undisciplining Totality

in "tonality and racism" Jason Yust advocates for dropping the concept of tonality as an organizing principle in music curricula, analytical methods, and theoretic discourse. He shows that the historical conception of tonality is inextricably linked to white-supremacist structures, and considered as a purely musical property the concept is ill-defined. Centering art music from a small geographic area and narrow chronological span has established and perpetuated music curricula and scholarship that are racist and culturally chauvinist. The unique complexity of the parameter of harmony in music that has been canonized as the "common practice" has resulted in a disproportionate focus on tonality at the expense of other music-shaping parameters such as rhythm, timbre, texture, register, dynamics, and articulation.My response is partly in the form of a literature review, citing additional work by other scholars that engages with the issues Yust raises. I begin by foregrounding these issues in the context of pedagogy, an important starting point for changing the field that has received far less respect within the discipline of music theory than music-theoretic and music-analytic scholarship (Kim 2023; VanHandel 2023). Most undergraduate textbooks used in music-theory core courses are devoted primarily to explaining pitch structures—or, in Justin London's (2020: 425) formulation, "What We Teach: Harmony, Harmony, Harmony." This restricted scope is sometimes signaled by the books' titles (e.g., Tonal Harmony and Voice Leading Aldwell, Schachter, and Cadwallader 2018, A Concise Introduction to Tonal Harmony Burstein and Straus 2020, Tonal Harmony Kostka, Payne, and Almén 2017, Harmony in Context Roig-Francolí 2020, but sometimes not (e.g., Music in Theory and Practice Benward and Saker 2020, The Musician's Guide to Theory and Analysis Clendinning and Marvin 2020, The Complete Musician Laitz and Callahan 2023). Philip Ewell (2023: 38n48) quotes editor Justin Hoffman's observation that these seven textbooks comprise roughly 96 percent of the market share, although it is not clear whether this refers to the United States only or to the Anglosphere. Ewell documents the very small percentages of repertoire by nonwhite, nonmale composers in these seven textbooks (37–42), supporting the claim that they foster institutionalized racism and sexism (for more on this topic see Hein 2018; Kajikawa 2019; Molk 2019, 2021; Molk and Ohnona 2020; Palfy and Gilson 2018; Reed 2021; and Reid 2022).As Timothy Chenette, Stacey Davis, and Stanley Kleppinger (2022) have shown, pedagogical materials for musicianship courses are similarly focused on pitch—although privileging melody over harmony—and on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European concert music. The authors observe that despite new research in the last quarter-century, aural skills training has changed very little (141). They advocate for more diverse repertoire and learning objectives that more closely resemble real-world musical skills, such as detecting errors in ensemble rehearsals and improvising accompaniments. To take this idea further, aural recognition of timbres and common music-production techniques are other useful skills for twenty-first-century musicians. Additional ideas and methods for revising musicianship curricula can be found in Cleland and Fleet 2020; MTO2021; and VanHandel 2020.The focus on harmony and the comparative neglect of other organizing musical features is also typical of jazz-theory textbooks (e.g., The Jazz Theory Book Levine 1995, Jazz Theory Resources Ligon 2001, Creative Jazz Improvisation Reeves and Walsh 2022, and Jazz Theory Terefenko 2017) and music-theory textbooks oriented toward popular music (e.g., Music Theory Remixed Holm-Hudson [2016, Theory for Today's Musician Turek and McCarthy 2019, and Music Theory for Musical Theatre Bell and Chicurel 2008), which is surprising given the importance of syncopation and other forms of rhythmic play in these genres. The multiauthor online open-access textbook Open Music Theory 2 (Gotham et al. 2023) does a better job in this regard, with the expected chapters on rhythm fundamentals, sections on jazz and pop that include discussions of rhythm in these genres, and on metric dissonance and hypermeter (although these are relegated to the very end of the text); there is also a section on orchestration and a fairly diverse range of musical examples.Recent work has advocated for revising the theory curriculum to be more inclusive, encompassing different musical repertoires, styles, and parameters that would be more welcoming to students with different musical backgrounds and interests. London (2020) has observed that typical core theory curricula remain overly focused on the notated score, piano-centric, and constrained to a narrow repertoire. He advocates for making connections to other disciplines and an increased emphasis on writing about music. Richard Cohn (2015) has argued convincingly for the value of a greater focus on meter; this could be supported by Matthew Santa's (2020) textbook Hearing Rhythm and Meter. Revised models of the traditional theory curriculum are offered in de Clercq 2019, Hiljeh 2012, Lavengood 2019, and Peebles 2019; a wide variety of pedagogical materials are presented in VanHandel 2020.Pitch structures are privileged in music-theoretic and music-analytic scholarship as well as in pedagogy, although this is slowly starting to change. The disciplinary centering of harmony and tonality has been long recognized—indeed, nearly two hundred years ago Fétis and Berlioz both lamented the underdeveloped state of rhythm in theory and in practice (Arlin 2000: 261). More recently, Ben Duinker and Hubert Léveillé Gauvin (2017) surveyed the topics discussed in four prominent music-theory journals (Journal of Music Theory, Music Theory Spectrum, Music Analysis, and Music Theory Online) between 1979 and 2014. Among these, the most popular topics were harmony, tonality, form, Schenkerian analysis, and set theory (Duinker and Léveillé Gauvin 2017: para. 5.3); with the exception of form, all of these topics are primarily concerned with pitch. The authors also document the small canon of white male European composers whose music receives the majority of analytical attention. London explains the connection between these two problems: Music theory is largely an inductive practice, based upon a very small number of privileged examples from which more general principles of harmony, phrase structure, rhythm, and form are derived. Moreover, the use of this set of examples, cherry-picked from a "common practice period" (. . . roughly 1700–1900), privileges certain parameters such as melody, rhythm, and (especially) harmony over others like timbre and texture. This approach to theory and analysis is highly problematic in and of itself, for it leads to theories of musical structure which are necessarily incomplete, which in turn warps our analytic practice. (London 2022: para. 1.5)London (2022: para. 6.5) recommends ameliorating these problems by using larger and more representative corpora, acknowledging biases, not overfitting theoretical models to the data, and thinking in terms of loose plans rather than rigid scripts. A method for adjusting corpora to better reflect the diversity of their sources, the Anti-Discriminatory Alignment System, is presented in Shea et al. (2024).The problems of exclusion in music theory are classist as well as racist and sexist. The conventional model of major-minor tonality was based on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European "concert music" or "art music"—terms implying that vernacular musics are unworthy of concert performances and do not qualify as art, or implicitly as high art. The high/low art distinction is centuries old, but as Matthew Gelbart (2007: 9) explains, before the late eighteenth century, musical categories were based more on function than social origin. The study of popular music has been granted a certain degree of academic legitimacy, but in most North American music programs it remains ancillary, despite offering greater diversity of repertoire and underrepresented artists who have been marginalized by race, gender, and socioeconomic status (Flory 2020; Wright, Coddington, and Mall 2020).Popular music also offers diversity of harmonic syntax. In a section on harmonic function, Yust considers whether rock music should be considered as nontonal because it does not follow the "classical" norms of harmonic progressions, a stance he concludes would be absurd. At least some of popular music's divergences from conventional models of harmonic syntax likely stem from the influence of the blues, especially in rock and related genres from the mid- to latetwentieth century. The blues foregrounds subdominant harmony and uses so-called retrogressive motions like V–IV, although these characteristics are also found in nineteenth-century concert music (Cutler 2016; Schmalfeldt 2022; Stein 1983). Dmitri Tymoczko asserts that harmonic motion in rock music can be either tonal or modal, conventionally functional or retrofunctional: retrogressions privileging diatonically close progressions that harmonize descending stepwise melodic motion (Tymoczko 2023: chap. 2). His model is intuitively appealing, although it is fitted to the data in the problematic 200-song corpus derived from Rolling Stone magazine's "500 Greatest Songs of All Time" (de Clercq and Temperley 2011; de Clercq 2013, 2017; Temperley and de Clercq 2017; Temperley 2018)—a small corpus compiled by a group of mostly unnamed music-industry experts, which is very strongly biased toward rock music from the late 1960s and 1970s by white male artists.1 The data might well look different if it included more recent popular music and a broader range of genres. Temperley and de Clercq's analysis of their corpus demonstrates the prominence of the IV chord and the bidirectional tendencies of chord motions, in contrast to the more unidirectional tendencies of chord progressions in conventional major-minor tonality. These conclusions are further supported by corpus studies conducted by Christopher W. White and Ian Quinn (2018) of harmonic analyses derived from the examples in Stefan Kostka, Dorothy Payne, and Byron Almén's (2017) Tonal Harmony, a very small corpus (46 excerpts) from a highly constrained repertoire, and the McGill-Billboard corpus of annotated popular songs, which is larger and broader than the Rolling Stone corpus (649 songs from the Billboard Hot 100 list, 1958–1991). In Kostka, Payne, and Almén 2017, the main opposing tonal pole is the V chord, and harmonic motions have a preferred direction, while in the McGill-Billboard corpus the IV chord is the main opposing tonal pole and harmonic relations are bidirectional. These characteristics resonate with an idea from an older source concerning a much older repertoire: Carl Dahlhaus's (1990: 223) contention that fifth-relations in modal music are bilateral while those in tonal music are directional. Tymoczko (2023: 76) describes this similarity as "the counterintuitive association between early and late modality."The models described above demonstrate that popular musics can use either conventionally functional ("tonal") or retrofunctional ("modal") harmonic structures. Walter Everett (2004) has described a series of different tonal systems used in rock, which can be summarized as major, minor, modal, mixed, blues, parallel-triad, and chromatic. I have revised these categories in Biamonte 2017 to major/mixolydian, aeolian/dorian, blues, minor/phrygian, and chromatic (although I now think that conventional minor and phrygian/locrian should be separate categories). But as Yust observes in his essay in this issue, much recent popular music is tonally unclear. Examples abound of weak or absent tonics (Spicer 2017), double-tonic axis tonalities (Ferrandino 2022; Nobile 2020; Richards 2017) and chord loops that are not conventionally functional (Acevedo 2020; Duinker 2019; Peres 2016). New categories of double-tonic and ambiguous tonic should be added.Which brings me, finally, to Yust's main point. I agree that treating tonality as an organizing principle and as a universal concept, rather than a major-minor key system exemplified by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western European art music, promotes institutionalized racism and classism. A generalized construct of a pitch collection plus a hierarchy of stability and possibly a set of syntactic conventions, allowing for multiple kinds of tonalities, could be useful as a descriptor; terms like "dominant" and "interval" have already undergone such expansions of meaning. I do not see this as a movement backward, as Yust suggests: "We might therefore say that we have regressed from 'tonality' to Fétis and Choron's original 'tonalities'" and "instead of reverting to the usage 'tonalities'" (67). I am not suggesting that the concept is applicable to all musics, but it could have explanatory power for syncretic musics as well as music from what Tymoczko (2011) calls the "extended common practice," comprising Western music from the eleventh century to the present. For musics outside of this tradition, terms like tonality and associated concepts like "key," "tonic," and "scale" are likely to be misrepresentations. Yust's thoughtful and informative article is a very welcome encouragement to question fundamental organizing principles in the field that have been taken for granted for far too long.