Polytonality
Polytonality (also polyharmony
Some examples of bitonality superimpose fully harmonized sections of music in different keys.
History
In traditional music
Lithuanian traditional singing style
Tribes throughout India—including the Kuravan of Kerala, the Jaunsari of Uttar Pradesh, the Gond, the Santal, and the Munda—also use bitonality, in responsorial song.[6]
In classical music
In
Another early use of polytonality occurs in the
Although it is only used in one section and intended to represent drunken soldiers, there is an early example of polytonality in Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber's short composition Battalia, written in 1673.[10]
Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring is widely credited with popularizing bitonality, and contemporary writers such as Casella (1924) describe him as the progenitor of the technique: "the first work presenting polytonality in typical completeness—not merely in the guise of a more or less happy 'experiment', but responding throughout to the demands of expression—is beyond all question the grandiose Le Sacre du Printemps of Stravinsky (1913)".[11]
Bartók's "Playsong" demonstrates easily perceivable bitonality through "the harmonic motion of each key ... [being] relatively uncomplicated and very diatonic".[12] Here, the "duality of key" featured is A minor and C♯ minor.
Other polytonal composers influenced by Stravinsky include those in the French group, Les Six, particularly Darius Milhaud, as well as Americans such as Aaron Copland.[13][page needed]
Polytonality and polychords
Polytonality requires the presentation of simultaneous key-centers. The term "polychord" describes chords that can be constructed by superimposing multiple familiar tonal sonorities. For example, familiar ninth, eleventh, and thirteenth chords can be built from or decomposed into separate chords:
Thus polychords do not necessarily suggest polytonality, but they may not be explained as a single tertian chord. The Petrushka chord is an example of a polychord.[17] This is the norm in jazz, for example, which makes frequent use of "extended" and polychordal harmonies without any intended suggestion of "multiple keys."[citation needed]
Polyvalency
The following passage, taken from Beethoven's Piano Sonata in E♭, Op. 81a (Les Adieux), suggests clashes between tonic and dominant harmonies in the same key.[18]
Leeuw points to Beethoven's use of the clash between tonic and dominant, such as in his Third Symphony, as polyvalency rather than bitonality, with polyvalency being, "the telescoping of diverse functions that should really occur in succession to one another".[2]
Polymodality
Passages of music, such as
Polyscalarity
Polyscalarity is defined as "the simultaneous use of musical objects which clearly suggest different source-collections.
Challenges
Some music theorists, including Milton Babbitt and Paul Hindemith have questioned whether polytonality is a useful or meaningful notion or "viable auditory possibility".[23] Babbitt called polytonality a "self-contradictory expression which, if it is to possess any meaning at all, can only be used as a label to designate a certain degree of expansion of the individual elements of a well-defined harmonic or voice-leading unit".[24] Other theorists to question or reject polytonality include Allen Forte and Benjamin Boretz, who hold that the notion involves logical incoherence.[25]
Other theorists, such as Dmitri Tymoczko, respond that the notion of "tonality" is a psychological, not a logical notion.[25] Furthermore, Tymoczko argues that two separate key-areas can, at least at a rudimentary level, be heard at the same time: for example, when listening to two different pieces played by two different instruments in two areas of a room.[25]
Octatonicism
Some critics of the notion of polytonality, such as Pieter van den Toorn, argue that the octatonic scale accounts in concrete pitch-relational terms for the qualities of "clashing", "opposition", "stasis", "polarity", and "superimposition" found in Stravinsky's music and, far from negating them, explains these qualities on a deeper level.[26] For example, the passage from Petrushka, cited above, uses only notes drawn from the C octatonic collection C–C♯–D♯–E–F♯–G–A–A♯.
See also
References
- ^ Cole and Schwartz 2012.
- ^ a b c Leeuw 2005, 87.
- ^ Jordania 2006, 119–120.
- ^ Račiūnaitė-Vyčinienė 2006.
- ^ Anon. 2010.
- ^ Babiracki 1991, 76.
- ^ Scholes 1970, 448–449.
- ^ Whittall 2001.
- ^ Crawford 2001, 503.
- ^ Ryker 2005.
- ^ Casella 1924, 164.
- ^ Kostka and Payne 1995, 495.
- ^ Marquis 1964.
- ^ Seymour 2007, 141–142.
- ^ White 1970, 119.
- ^ a b Marquis 1964, [page needed].
- ^ Ellenberger 2005, 20.
- ^ Marquis 1964, [page needed].
- ^ Leeuw 2005, 88.
- ^ Vincent 1951, 272.
- ^ Tymoczko 2002, 83.
- ^ a b Tymoczko 2002, 85.
- ^ Baker 1993, 35.
- ^ Babbitt 1949, 380.
- ^ a b c Tymoczko 2002, 84.
- ^ Van den Toorn and Tymoczko 2003, 179.
Sources
- Anon. 2010. "Sutartinės, Lithuanian Multipart Songs". UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage website (accessed 29 January 2016).
- Babbitt, Milton (1949). "The String Quartets of Bartók". The Musical Quarterly 35, no. 3 (July): 377–85.
- Babiracki, Carol M. (1991). "Tribal Music in the Study of Great and Little Traditions of Indian Music". In ISBN 978-0-226-57409-7.
- ISBN 9780631143352.
- Casella, Alfred (1924). "Tone Problems of Today". The Musical Quarterly 10:159–171.
- Cole, Richard, and Ed Schwartz (eds.) (2012). "Polyharmony". Virginia Tech Multimedia Music Dictionary. Virginia Tech. Retrieved 2007-08-04.
- Crawford, Richard (2001). America's Musical Life: A History. New York: W. W. Norton.
- Ellenberger, Kurt (2005). Materials and Concepts in Jazz Improvisation (fifth ed.). Grand Rapids: Keytone. ISBN 0-9709811-3-9.
- Jordania, Joseph (2006). Who Asked the First Question?. Logos.
- ISBN 978-0-07-035874-4.
- ISBN 9789031302444).
- Marquis, G. Welton (1964). Twentieth Century Music Idioms. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall.
- Račiūnaitė-Vyčinienė, Daiva (2006). "The Lithuanian Archaic Polyphonic Chant Sutartinė", translated by E. Novickas. Lituanus 52, no. 2: 26–39. ISSN 0024-5089.
- Ryker, Harrison (2005). Invited paper no. 5, Soft and Sweet, Loud and Sour: Looking Back on Polytonality. In New Music in China and The C.C. Liu Collection at the University of Hong Kong, 47–48. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005, ISBN 978-96-2209-772-8.
- Scholes, Percy A. (1970). "Harmony". The Oxford Companion to Music. London: Oxford University Press.
- Seymour, Claire (2007). The Operas of Benjamin Britten Expression and Evasion. Boydell Press. ISBN 978-1-84383-314-7.
- Tymoczko, Dmitri (2002). "Stravinsky and the Octatonic: A Reconsideration". Music Theory Spectrum 24, no. 1:68–102.
- Van den Toorn, Pieter C., and Dmitri Tymoczko (2003). "Colloquy: Stravinsky and the Octatonic: The Sounds of Stravinsky". Music Theory Spectrum 25, no. 1 (Spring): 167–202.
- Vincent, John (1951). The Diatonic Modes in Modern Music. University of California Publications in Music 4. Berkeley: University of California Press.
- White, Eric Walter (1970). Benjamin Britten His Life and Operas. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-01679-8.
- Whittall, Arnold (2001). "Bitonality". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan.
Further reading
- Beach, David (1983). Aspects of Schenkerian Theory. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-02800-3.
- Hindemith, Paul (1941–42). The Craft of Musical Composition, vols. 1 and 2, translated by Arthur Mendel and Otto Ortmann. New York: Associated Music Publishers; London: Schott. Original German edition as Unterweisung im Tonsatz. 3 vols. Mainz, B. Schott's Söhne, 1937–70.
- ISBN 978-0-313-20478-4.
- Wilson, Carl (1997). "Comments by Carl Wilson". The Pet Sounds Sessions (Booklet). The Beach Boys. Capitol Records.
- Wilson, Paul (1992). The Music of Béla Bartók. Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-05111-7.