“Tonality” and Its Discontents

as i sipped my morning coffee on May 16, James McWhorter's (2023) headline "Is Musicology Racist?" assailed me from the pages of the New York Times.1 With this opinion piece, McWhorter joined the party of pundits attacking Phil Ewell, whose provocative ideas have just appeared in his new book, On Music Theory, and Making Music More Welcoming for Everyone (2023). Conflating music theory and musicology, McWhorter decried in his essay the woke ideology whereby the monuments of Western culture are summarily dismissed. But conflation aside, I want to begin by addressing the question as he phrased it.To put it bluntly, musicology is undeniably racist, most glaringly so in its determination to avoid perhaps the most unlikely event in Western music history: the rise to world dominance of American Black idioms following the advent of sound recording a hundred years ago. A soundscape featuring blues, jazz, R he implies that the tonal center plants a big yellow star on the coats of all its others. Schoenberg was preoccupied with the political situation in Vienna in 1911, Ewell with that of contemporary North America. And I just copied those passages from my Feminine Endings, where I marshaled them to help explain the apparent necessity of purging qualities viewed as feminine in tonal music (McClary 1991: 105–6). I might add that my father's Cherokee family was subjected to genocidal policies: if they did not assimilate (i.e., resolve to the tonic), they faced extermination. The elevation of "tonality" as an abstract ideal that transcends human culture, that demands the elimination of impurities for the sake of some notion of closure, presents in music a particularly visceral experience of this logic. Racist, anti-Semitic, misogynist. "Tonality" has a lot to answer for.But, of course, "tonality" can't do anything. It simply qualifies as one of many cultural practices invented and deployed by human agents. And those human agents have indeed sometimes wielded tonal configurations in problematic ways. I perceive little violence in musical procedures from before the nineteenth century, even though many of the components Yust lists may be traced back as far as the beginnings of music notation. They did not typically strive, however, to produce scenarios that pitted opposing forces against one another, demanding closure at all costs. But a zero-sum game of binaries, of victors and losers, did emerge in the 1800s.This economy manifests itself most obviously in opera. Think of all those plots in which a hapless white hero (Don José, Tristan, Samson, John the Baptist) has to battle it out with an exotic seductress (the gypsy Carmen, the Irish sorceress Isolde, the Palestinian Delilah, the Jewish princess Salome). The heroes all strive to abide by good diatonic principles (though Kurvenal has to keep reminding his master of his former allegiance to the common good); their female counterpoints traffic promiscuously in chromatic obfuscation. In all of these, both plots and the strategic imperatives of "tonality" demand death as if a necessity (Tristan, insofar as he comes to identify with Isolde's discourse, must meet the same fate). Such knock-down-drag-out encounters also occur in symphonic music; the first movements of Brahms's Third and Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphonies even feature orientalist dancers as second themes. All of these replicate and justify the logic of imperial expansion, with the lethal conflation of the racial other with the feminine. Can it be any wonder that a BIPOC (or female or LGBTQ) scholar would find these principles alarming?But "tonality" poses other problems as well. Our tonal blinders prevent us from processing not only musics of other cultures but also our own—if the Black idioms of the last hundred years qualify as America's mainstream. When I like many others added compositions by Florence Price to my syllabus after George Floyd's murder, I realized that I did not know how to engage appropriately with her scores, which make full use of triads and classical forms but set them somehow aslant. I contacted Phil Ewell and Christopher Jenkins and suggested that they hold a conference to address these issues. Theorizing African American Music, in 2022, was the first of many planned meetings focusing on repertories ranging from William Dawson to the most recent hip-hop.Yust's music example, the Eagles' "Seven Bridges Road," takes him into something of this terrain. He wisely advocates putting the song into its proper cultural context—one that inspires thousands of fans to go wild in arena concerts. No one, I think, imagines that those fans are busy trying to figure out what the tonic is. I would like for Yust to have gone into that context—the folk revival? Blues elements?—a bit more. In any case, we need theorists who can put "tonal" explanations to the side and who grapple seriously with other grammars and conventions.Yust lists and interrogates many of the characteristics often ascribed to tonality, from the pitch-centeredness of liturgical chant to the much more complex configurations of, say, Brahms. It would make little sense to group such stylistic diversity ranging over more than a millennium if we didn't somehow want to make this noun, à la Fétis, serve as something that has always differentiated "us" from everyone else. Even if we were to take the narrower definition designating the musical grammar of musics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, we still end up lumping together everything from Corelli to Mahler. In what theoretical universe can these exceedingly diverse practices sit together comfortably under a single umbrella? In pretending that these all operate according to a common practice we choose to ignore the vast cultural differences and musical practices that shaped composers over the course of those two centuries.And then there is the rest of Europe. Schenker at least was explicit in his exclusion of those repertories. Our Germano-centric methods can do little to illuminate, for instance, Berlioz—surely one of the great musical innovators. Richard Taruskin labored throughout his career to develop analytical methods appropriate to Eastern Europe repertories. Schenker's definition of "tonality," which prevails in most theory pedagogy, cannot deal adequately with any of these idioms. And to the extent that his method takes the standards of the German canon as universal, it cannot even shed much light on the cultural work accomplished by that repertory.Yust also grapples well with the unfortunate concept of the post-tonal—a term that continues to privilege "tonality" as the default position. As a theorist of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century repertories, I teach a seminar we refer to jokingly as pre-tonal, which has exactly the same problems (see, e.g., McClary 2004). The label itself implies that we are leading up to the advent of the Big Event. And no matter how hard I work to instill habits of attending to contrapuntal webs and the exceedingly sophisticated strategies available within modal practices, students still always want to know (like impatient kids in the backseat on a family trip) if we're there yet. And as soon as we reach Corelli, they toss aside everything they've learned and revert to Roman numerals; they've made it to the promised land, where all you have to do is identify chords. Surely this is an impoverished way of dealing even with Corelli, to say nothing of all his "tonal" successors.Very few music theorists have studied the repertories from before that magical moment, which is partly why they can accept the standard chords-and-forms approach to analysis that focuses exclusively on pitch. Megan Long and I have both wrestled with musics of the seventeenth century, and although our approaches differ, we both have concluded that the parameter that changes over the course of that period is temporality, with pitch as a kind of raw material composers shoved around to produce various means of shaping time. Indeed, musicians in the 1600s delighted in playing with the elasticity of time perception: manipulating their pitch patterns to invent radically new ways of experiencing compression, elongation, acceleration, deflation, or spiraling, often in quick succession within a single work. They deployed homophonic textures when those suited them, and they even knew how to construct the particular hierarchy that came to prevail in the eighteenth century. But most of them preferred doing what I have called "the time warp" (see McClary 2016).5 Yes, their successors looked back and dismissed these strategies as baroque, in the pejorative sense of the word, and theorists have mostly avoided getting sucked into that morass, that funhouse of distorting mirrors. But I have contended that we cannot know what "tonality" is without taking this back story into account.Rameau based much of his theory of harmony on Corelli's music. But as he applied his Cartesian premises to those sonatas, he broke Corelli's contrapuntal webs down into freeze-frames, thereby halting motion in favor of individual, objectified moments. That theoretical move eradicated consideration of the temporal dimension of musical process for generations to come, up to our present moment; the melodic integrity of the bass line was sacrificed in exchange for a unified theory of triads, in which inversions all count as instances of the same entity.6 (To his credit, Schenker did work to promote the horizontal dimension in analysis.)Yet for all that Rameau looked to Corelli for his models, his own music bears little resemblance to that of his Italian predecessor, especially with respect to temporality.7 In short, there really was no common practice—not unless you reduce music to little other than triads. By assuming we can account adequately even for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century repertories through a bankrupt notion of "tonality," we gravely diminish the vitality and ingenuity of any given composer or piece. We can do so only by pushing aside as irrelevant the very parameters that make music work—the elements that underlie powerful performances, compositional innovation, and listening practices.Along with Yust, I would advocate ditching the term tonality altogether, not only because of its suspect ideological history but also because it has long served as an obstacle to what all of us surely want to achieve: more effective ways of understanding musical practices. In my classes and writing, I advocate approaches that attend to those aspects of music often dismissed as "subjective": the shaping of time, affect, color, qualities of motion, and metaphors related to bodily experience. To be sure, all these depend on pitches—the only element directly visible in a notated score. But pitch is never what is at issue, any more than his use of individual words can account for Shakespeare or a particular brand of oil paint for Van Gogh.Did it take problems associated with racism to dethrone "tonality"? Perhaps so. But we'll be better musicians and analysts if we bid farewell to its distorting lens.