Customer Reviews

Tonality in Western Culture: A Critical and Historical Perspective

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I have not read this book, but based on a clearly written review by someone at GoodReads named Otto Lehto I am not likely to. I am familiar with the background of the kind of thinking about which Lehto is more diplomatic than I am, and I think this sounds like a dangerous book.

Lehto writes: "Instead of a clear progression or a natural necessity towards full chromatism and free tonality (to be short: Wagner and Schoenberg), Norton argues for certain human universals that are eternal but also take an infinite variety of forms (scales, tunings and tonal expressions). This contrasts with the boringly progressive view of music history as a sequence from the earlier (lower) to the later (higher), corresponding to the unfolding of the circle of fifths and the overtone series and other natural orders. This history, which is supposed to unfold in an ever-expanding series of stages to ever higher and freer forms of musical expression, is tacitly accepted by the followers of Schenker, Rameau, Schoenberg and others. It is this view that Norton criticises with his thesis that, instead of a universal truth of natural reason, "tonality is a decision made against the chaos of pitch" (p.4)."

Well, hello, EVERY composition is a "decision made against the chaos of pitch," so for this type of remark to make sense you have to be thinking INSIDE the box of the polemicist's paradigm. If Lehto is correct, then, according to Richard Norton, those of us progressive, boring, educated types who have a mere routine idea that style and idiom are "nothing more" than "a sequence from the earlier (lower) to the later (higher)" can be simply dismissed. Our views are apparently nothing compared to Norton's insight of the necessity of preserving his idea of the materials of music.

Make no mistake, the very idea that "certain human universals... are eternal... and take... forms [such as] scales, tunings and tonal expressions" is musical fascism. Exactly this argument has been made by fascists from Nazi Germany to Rolling Stone magazine, as well as proto-fascist thinkers like Heinrich Schenker, whose theories are persuasive, and certainly more applicable than he would want you to make them, since he thought he could prove mathematically that Brahms was the last real composer, end of discussion. But beware of fascism in all its forms, not least in a form that discusses our society's chief cultural addiction, music. If you accept a musical fascism, you may have accepted a potentially pretty far-reaching form of it. There is really little difference in the effect on your skull of a head-knocking Nazi trying to get you to hate Modernism and listen to Pfitzner than of a head-knocking rock'n'roller trying to get you to hate any intellectualism whatsoever and accept his cultural view. What, fascism in popular music? I say fascism has never been more popular in America than at present.

Reading a book like this is always relevant if you have good business acquiring "knowledge of the enemy." I was directed toward it by reading Richard Bokina's book Opera and Politics. Sure, a good biologist can learn about life forms by studying tropical diseases. But anyone less than a biologist could easily get infected by them.