Tonality as Law, Contravention, Performativity

Trans: Revista Transcultural de Música 13 (2009)Dossier especial sobre música y estudios sobre performanceSpecial issue on music and performance studies

Tonality as Law, Contravention, Performativity

Arved Ashby

http://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=3732449

François-Joseph Fétis, the first systematic scholar of tonal

history, referred to a "law of tonality” in the 1840s. Over the

century that followed, writers continued to develop tonality as

an a priori, binding, and indeed legalist concept.1 Philosophies

of law center upon definitions and essences — in short upon

1

I am indebted to an anonymous reader and to Jonathan Neufeld for their candid assessments of an earlier version of this essay. Prof. Neufeld was particularly generous in offering vital criticism, opening my eyes to unsuspected nuances of law and legality, and revealing imprecisions and logical flaws in a previous draft.? In Carl Dahlhaus’s description, Fétis gave tonality a new “formal definition”; Dahlhaus, Studies on the Origin of Harmonic Tonality, trans. Robert O. Gjerdingen (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), p.7. By contrast, Matthew Shirlaw found Fétis’s conception of tonality to be hopelessly vague; Shirlaw, The Theory of Harmony (London: Novello, 1917), pp.460-464. The monographs in question are Fétis’s Esquisse de l’histoire de l’harmonie (1841) and Traité de l'harmonie (1844).

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normativity. This is true both of positivist legal theories,

which take an unchanging view of statutes, and of so-called

natural law and its appeal to basic moral truths. Some 70 years

after Fétis, Arnold Schoenberg — the most infamous of post-tonal

composers — declared these tonal legalist conceptions at an end,

at least for himself. He gave some indication of what a post-

legalist music might entail when he wrote in his Harmonielehre

(1911) that “I do not, as apparently all theorists before me have

done, consider tonality an eternal law, a natural law of music,

even though this law is consistent with the simplest conditions

of the natural model…”2

Tonality represents a point where the individual composer

negotiates her own identity within the socialized world of pitch

relations, and as such it took on more and more of a performative

aspect across the previous century. The concept Schoenberg

described could be called performative rather than normative in

that it represents a fragmented concept, one centering less on

precept than on individual creative action. With this shift,

composers of art music had to readdress the basic question: what2 Arnold Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, trans. Roy E. Carter (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978), p.27.

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kind of relation between the individual and the larger social

order does art music demonstrate? One can speak of gender and

sexuality as laws, as codes of conduct and expectation — a set of

“male” laws, a series of “heterosexual” laws — to which the

individual aspires as a way of entering society. So legal

thinking generalizes while performance theory works, not to

subvert the normativity of gender so much as to expose it.

Performativity shows the subject grappling with imposed norms as

“an assignment which we never quite carry out according to

expectation, so that we never quite inhabit the gender norms or

ideals we are compelled to approximate” (Jonathan Culler).3 The

differences between normativity and performativity boil down to

the relation of the individual to the general: if the law

presumes compliant subjects, with specific exceptions that only

prove the rule, performative theory assumes a certain manner of

individual failure, an essential and defining form of

noncompliance.

Judith Butler, following Michel Foucault, links the

disparity between normative and performative to different 3 Culler, “Performative Language,” in Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p.104.

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understandings of power. Legal theorists justify a normative

conception of the law that will in turn justify specific legal

decisions. There are no gray areas in criminal liability, at

least in U.S. legal discourse, only accepted immunities of self-

defense, insanity, and so forth.4 Performativity, on the other

hand, precludes the kind of power structure that allows and

perpetuates such dualisms. Butler describes the Foucauldian

shattering of single “subject” into multiple practices as

follows:

The shift from the subject of power to a set of practices inwhich power is actualized in its effects signals, for Foucault, a departure from the conceptual model of sovereignty that, he claims, dominates thinking on politics,law, and the question of right. Among the very practices that Foucault counters to that of the subject are those thatseek to account for the formation of the subject itself: ‘let us ask… how things work at the level of on-going subjugation, at the level of those continuous and uninterrupted processes which subject our bodies, govern ourgestures, dictate our behaviours, etc.’5

4 George P. Fletcher, “Discourse,” in Basic Concepts of Legal Thought (Oxford and NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp.71-73; Fletcher points to the dualities and strict contrasts described by legal theorist Niklau Luhmann in Rechtssystem und Rechtsdogmatik. See also Mark C. Murphy, “Natural Law Theory,” and Brian H. Bix, “Legal Positivism,” in The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory (Malden, Mass. and Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), pp.15-28, 29-49.5 Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), p.79.

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Performative ideas came about in the wake of such decenterings,

and allowed theorists to reject binary power constructs. It is

no coincidence that Foucault’s decentering influence isfelt so

keenly in the twin domains of sexuality and power, discourses

once marked by — to quote Foucault himself — “that solid and

global kind of domination that one person exercises over others,

or one group over another…”6

No writer on music has yet explored these differences

between law and performative identity, and one reason must be the

offhand way that musicians have usually invoked musical “laws.”

Legal authorities of positivist mindset work to separate these

meanings: for instance, a judge might be criticized for invoking

“Judeo-Christian moral and ethical standards” in a sodomy case.7

In music, however, these various manifestations of “law” are

often ill-defined and thrown together in support of normative

thinking. Schoenberg himself, though connecting with ideas of law

in significant ways, also confused the several senses of law in

his writings, habitually conflating the natural, the musical, and

6 Foucault, p.96.7 As Fletcher relates, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Blackmum, in the original case, also reproached the state of Georgia for citing Leviticus in support of its anti-sodomy statute. Fletcher, Basic Concepts of Legal Thought, p.74, n.6.

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the theological.8 Tonality is especially susceptible to various

invocations of law, most conspicuously with the “natural” precept

of physical acoustics, specifically the primacy of the octave,

fifth, and third intervals within the overtone series.

Across the century and a half or so after Fétis, concepts of

the "law of tonality” have differed in large and small ways from

one polemicist to another. In looking into these aspects of

tonal discourse, we arrive at the subject of tonal theory itself

and the question of what that music-analytic term might actually

mean. We find in the end that tonality resembles law only in a

dialectical or Foucauldian sense, with principles given their

significance by deviation from said principles: it is the

contraventions that define the rule.

1. early tonality

8 For an astute discussion of Schoenberg’s conflation of the musical and the theological, see Dahlhaus, “Schoenberg’s Aesthetic Theology,” in Schoenberg and the New Music, trans. Derrick Puffett and Alfred Clayton (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p.90.

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Writers after Jean-Philippe Rameau (the Traité de l'harmonie, 1722)

described and theorized tonality as (1) an enterprise bound by

law in the sense of a natural principle, and then as (2) governed

by law in the sense of a theoretical generalization cutting

across individual compositional practice and choice. While

tonality in the first phase was consistent with ideas of law as a

nature-given singularity, in phase two this law-aspect became a

matter of constraint — it turned into a law in the ethical or

jural, rather than scientific, sense. The first sense is the

sense subscribed to by philosophers when they speak of law as a

generalizable truth. Musical law in the first meaning would

regiment pitch relationships, while the second would regulate the

people devising those pitch relationships: a description of

nature was expanded into an ideology.

Within the first part of this history, tonality was

considered natural in the sense of being self-evident,

replicable, and largely inalterable. Those understanding

tonality along these lines often aligned music with the “new

science” of Kepler, Galileo, and Newton. Those taking such a

perspective saw the modal pluralism of medieval practice giving

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way to the centralized system of tonal music, the variety of the

church modes to an elegant duality of major and minor. In this

view, tonal practice and theory repudiated the plurality of the

church modes - and, in exchanging more than five scale-types for

only two, represented a rationalized centralization. Rameau’s

accomplishment was showing the empirical bias of musical practice

in terms of a single natural principle: that structural

foundation and generator of harmonies in a work that Rameau

called the fundamental bass. When he redrew the figured bass for

a passage in Corelli's Op.5, throwing out the composer’s own

description of the chords and supplying his own, he did so not to

re-interpret the music so much as to correct a hearing of it by

aligning it with this natural principle.9

When Fétis referred to a “law of tonality” in his later

writings, roughly a century after Rameau’s, he meant to

distinguish between the relatively unlegislated modal practice of

placing root-position triads on most any degree of the scale, and

the necessary prominence of a single essential tonic chord in

tonality. Fétis wrote in his Esquisse de L’histoire de L’harmonie (1840): 9 See Thomas Christensen, Rameau and Musical Thought in the Enlightenment (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp.129-131.

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“Now let us suppose the augmented-sixth chord f, a, d-sharp can be

spontaneously changed into the seventh chord f, a, eb; an unexpected

modulation will result from it since, following the law of

tonality, the seventh chord f, a, eb, being the dominant,

immediately determines the key of b-flat.”10 Both Rameau and Fétis

invoke law, but Rameau invokes the basse fondamentale while Fétis

generalizes musical relationships according to a circularity

between definition-based-on-practice and practice-based-on-

definition. A law is more obviously political when it suggests a

specific outcome, less ostensibly so when it summons external

principles — whether it be the morality invoked by natural-law

philosophers or Rameau’s Newtonian basse fondamentale.

Moving ahead yet another century, we find Pierre Boulez

taking an obviously historicist view of tonality’s beginnings:

“the rational appeal of tonality… and the new possibility of

generalizing – even standardizing – musical relationships was

essential to the further development of the art. Without

tonality music might well have either become repetitious or else

declined into a kind of mannerism overwhelmed by sterile 10 Esquisse de l'histoire de l'harmonie, transl. and ed. Mary I. Arlin (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press, 1994), p.135.

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complications." He goes on to say in the same essay that

serialism of the post-WWII Darmstadt School contravened tonality,

but paid a price in “sacrificing the power of immediate

generalization characteristic of tonal functions.” Science had

already found it necessary to do much the same thing, said

Boulez, when it abandoned abstractions like “pure” - as opposed

to applied - mathematics and ceased its appeals to “the laws of

nature” like Newton's law of gravitation, Mendel’s laws, and the

ideal gas laws.11 Since there are so many more scale-types in

the modes than there are in tonality, multiple arrangements of

whole and half steps, it is harder to hypothesize the interval

makeup of a chord on a particular scale degree or how such a

sonority might relate to a chord on another degree. In tonality,

by contrast, standard cadence progressions - and wider music-

structural spans, incurring a different sense of structure - are

made possible by the generalizeable relations between chords on

degrees 2, 4, 5, 6, and 1.

11 Boulez, Pierre, “Aesthetics and the Fetishists” (1962), in Orientations: Collected Writings by Pierre Boulez, ed. Jean-Jacques Nattiez (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp.37.

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In correlating tonal practice with scientific laws, Boulez

doubtless hoped to make that practice more concrete and specific.

Other writers have tried to do the same by associating tonality

with 18th-century social laws, describing modality’s “passage” to

tonality as a consolidation of cultural or political authority.

Such conclusions are all the more tempting when seen against the

huge socioeconomic changes that arrived later in Britain and the

continent, changes that could inspire simplistic notions of

tonality as some kind of capitalist language.12 Susan McClary

takes this perspective, describing tonality in the Enlightenment

as a means of articulating "a social world organized by means of

values such as rational control and goal-oriented striving for

progress - the values upon which leaders of the upwardly mobile

bourgeoisie traditionally have grounded their claim to

legitimacy, authority, and 'universality.'"13 She presents the

kind of conceptual model of sovereignty that Foucault aimed to

destabilize, defining the subject of power in terms of monolithic

12 Foucault warned of making such simplistic connections between the history of sexuality and the Industrial Revolution and emergence of capitalist economies. Foucault, “We ‘Other Victorians,’” in The History of Sexuality, Vol.1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978), pp.1-14.13 McClary, “A Music Dialectic from the Enlightenment: Mozart’s Piano Concerto in G Major, K.453, Movement 2,” Cultural Critique 4 (1986), p.135.

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tonal authority while Foucauldian destabilization would show

contravention of such restrictions or a failure to perpetuate

them — and thereby illuminate the rite of passage to individual

style.

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2. post-tonality

When at the turn of the 20th century many composers contravened

tonality as described above, they induced a crisis of definition

and demarcation - such that Paul Hindemith wrote, in 1949, that

“the concept of tonality and its appropriate treatment appears to

be so diversified today as to lack any unified basis.”14

Schoenbergian dissonance and Debussy scale-types spurred

theorists Heinrich Schenker and Adele Katz to draw up definitions

of tonality as a normative practice - effectively closing it off

from future particularization and implying its death as a living

compositional language. Schenker’s rejection of Schoenberg was

decisive: he scathingly portrayed his fellow Viennese as “the

godfather of new chords” and as a dangerous opportunist who

strove “for expansion and disintegration.”15 Other theorists,

14 Hindemith, “A New Comment on Tonality by Paul Hindemith,” trans. Andres Briner, Journal of Music Theory 6 (1960), pp.110.15 For a translation of Schenker’s descriptions of Schoenberg within his essay“Resumption of Urlinie Considerations,” see Sylvan Kalib’s “Thirteen Essays fromthe Three Yearbooks ‘Das Meisterwerk in der Musik’” (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern University, 1973); cited by Arnold Whittall, “Triadic Harmony and Tonal Structure in Britten,” Royal Musical Association Proceedings 106 (1979), pp.28-29. For Katz’s views, see her Challenge to Musical Tradition: A New Concept of Tonality (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1945). Jonathan Dunsby offers the following contrast between Schenker and Schoenberg as analysts, vis-à-vis their understanding of dissonance as either the end of a tradition

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differing from Schenker, wished to broaden rather than narrow off

definitions of tonality so that some of the new compositional

practices could be included under the tonal rubric. Here one

could mention Rudolph Reti’s classification of Debussy not in

terms of non-tonality, which is how Schenker and Katz classified

him, but in terms of “melodic tonality.” In Reti’s view, Debussy

also helped usher in a “third tonal state” - accessory to

tonality as well as atonality - that Reti called pantonality.

The French composer, in his view, “built a new positive concept

of tonality in music.”16

Joseph Yasser accounted for the tonal-atonal relation in

rather stranger terms, providing a Hegelian rendition that

manages to combine the conservatism of Schenker with the

or the continuance of one: “When Heinrich Schenker illustrates the lack of tonal prolongation in a Stravinsky excerpt, all we are being offered is an image of the end of music history, or of a future that never did arrive. WhenSchoenberg illustrates how Mozart’s dissonance can be understood only in termsof the total chromatic, we are being offered a link from the past to a future that did arrive and that did in this century yield many marvels of the human spirit.” Dunsby, “Schoenberg and Present-Day Theory and Practice,” in Constructive Dissonance: Arnold Schoneberg and the Transformations of Twentieth-Century Culture, ed. Juliane Brand and Christopher Hailey (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), p.190.16 Reti, “The Tonality of Debussy,” in Tonality Atonality Pantonality: A Study of Some Trends in Twentieth Century Music (London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1958), pp.19-30. Theterm “pantonality” had of course been proffered by Schoenberg as a more acceptable substitute for “atonality,” but his understanding of the word was almost diametrically opposed to Reti’s, confusingly enough.

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historical tripartism of Reti. According to Yasser, musical

systems don’t reach plateaus or points of maturity, but are in a

constant state of evolution. He saw tonality relating to

atonality as thesis to antithesis, but tonality was preceded in

this historical scheme by the same kind of opposition between

“infra-tonality” and “infra-atonality.” Infra-tonality was based

in an infra-diatonic scale of five regular degrees (the 1st, 2nd,

4th, 5th, and 6th degrees of the scale) supplemented by two others

(the 3rd and 7th degrees). Likewise, the contradiction between

tonality and atonality becomes synthesized at the level of

“supra-tonality,” where twelve regular degrees (the 12 chromatic

pitches) are accompanied (or perhaps embellished) by the seven

auxiliary degrees corresponding to the diatonic scale. This

continual succession through “evolutionary stages” might seem so

deterministic as to leave even less up to individual

compositional choice than the Schenkerian view. But

compositional choice lies with the precise articulation of such

theses, antitheses, and syntheses. For example, the tonal

composer might find herself poised between what Yasser calls

“victorious and organized Tonality” and “the relaxing effect of

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‘all-permitting’ Atonality,” before the cycle will repeat itself.

At this juncture she feels mired in the frustrating and confining

particularity of a certain mannerist tonality, and manages to

escape therefrom (Yasser says the composer “declares” the new

level) to an antithetical and liberating state of atonality:

[It is the] impossibility on the part of the modern composer to express himself adequately and in comparatively simple terms in the new ‘supra-diatonic’ language and to create at least a rudimentary musical grammar for it under existing conditions, which drives him to hypertrophic and groundless harmonic complication and to the proclamation of Atonality, in its most acute form, already long outgrown by him.17

These various and often contradictory arguments over

tonality in the 20th century differ most fundamentally in the way

they align particularity with generalization. For Schenker, the

threat posed by the particularity of atonality - a particularized

kind of music that dared to abandon the generality of tonal

practice, or indeed generality of just about any kind -

17 Joseph Yasser, A Theory of Evolving Tonality (New York: American Library of Musicology, 1932), p.342. Stravinsky made a similar statement about Schoenberg within a discussion of musicologist Edwin Lowinsky and Lowinsky’s assertion that “modality stands for an essentially stable, tonality for an essentially dynamic, view of the world.” To this, Stravinsky responded: “Does Schoenbergian ‘atonality,’ or ‘non-tonality,’ since ‘atonality’ doesn’t make any sense to me, represent the point of view of the flux?” Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Expositions and Developments (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1959), p.108.

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necessitated codification and defense of that generality. As

Fred Maus and others have pointed out, following ideas from

Foucault, histories of sexuality hold this same process of

defining normative practice in the face of deviance: in music

tonality was defined after the appearance of atonality, just as

heterosexuality was defined after “the invention of the

homosexual.”18 In attempting a single and universal theory of

tonality, Schenker developed tonality’s capacity for

generalization while the “atonal” composers desired local

specificity. (Schoenberg is said to have responded to a Schenker

middleground diagram of Beethoven’s “Eroica” with the question:

“Where are my favorite passages?” He then saw remnants of the

foreground and answered his own query: “Ah, there they are, in

those tiny notes.”19)

18 See Maus, “Sexual and Musical Categories,” in The Pleasure of Modernist Music: Listening, Meaning, Intention, Ideology, ed. by Arved Ashby (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2004), pp.153-175. As Maus discusses it, the duality in sexual discourse is highly relevant to discussions of tonality, as of course are the particularizations and “complications” of that discourse. Iwould argue that dualities of legality and prohibition, insofar as they can beseparated from sexual discourse, are even more relevant.19 The anecdote is recounted in at least two fairly recent sources: Joseph Kerman, Write All These Down: Essays on Music (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University ofCalifornia Press, 1994), p.168; and Charles Rosen, The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, expanded ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), p.35.

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Consider also an exchange between Ernest Guiraud, friend and

amanuensis to Georges Bizet, and the young Claude Debussy. In

this discussion, Guiraud advocated the collective interest by

promoting tonal regulation, while Debussy — a “pantonalist” in

Reti’s view — dissented on the basis of individual benefit.

Seated at the piano, Debussy insisted that parallel chords were

valid within a functioning musical composition. When he played a

series of streamed “incomplete chords,” Guiraud called them

“theoretically absurd” and said they had to resolve. Debussy

answered that they were lovely as they stood, theory or no

theory: “you have merely to listen,” he said, “pleasure is the

key.” But Guiraud answered him: “I would agree with you in

regard to an exceptional person who has discovered a discipline

for himself and who has an instinct which he is able to impose.

But how would you teach music to others?”20 He told Debussy, in

short, that there was no way of universalizing such individual,

non-theoretical pleasure.

20 The discussion took place either in 1889 or 1890, and was recorded by Maurice Emmanuel; as cited by Edward Lockspeiser, Debussy: His Life and Mind (New York: Macmillan, 1962), pp.206-207.

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We might take any one of several legal perspectives on this

revealing many-or-one dispute over tonality’s domain. In

advocating pleasure as the decisive quality, Debussy sounds like

a utilitarian along the lines of Jeremy Bentham and, after him,

Oliver Wendell Holmes: according to utilitarian principles, law

is evaluated to the degree that it optimizes social benefit,

measured according to the well-being of the population that it

serves. As for Guiraud, he responded to Debussy with ethical

arguments similar to those with which Ronald Dworkin answered

Bentham. For Dworkin, utilitarian thinking can lead to

dangerously arbitrary conclusions: taken to its logical extreme,

it leads to compromise solutions that are treacherous for being,

as he calls them, unprincipled and even “Solomonic.”21 If

Guiraud had pursued such a Dworkinian argument further, he might

well have concluded that Debussy’s approach to tonality-as-

21 Dworkin, Law’s Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1986), pp.178-184. Asan example of such questionable Solomonic solutions, Dworkin’s followers say the utilitarianist wouldn’t hesitate to kill one person if it would improve the well-being of ten others. The central utilitarian texts are Bentham’s Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1780) and John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism (1863). For a recent summary account of utilitarianism, see Fletcher, Basic Concepts of Legal Thought, pp.31-32. For a discussion of utilitarianism within the fairness-vs.-utility arguments of American tort law,see Benjamin C. Zipursky, “Philosophy of Tort Law,” in The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory, pp.128-129.

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pleasure would ultimately produce a non-tonality, a kind of

bastardized tonality-by-committee that was generalizable to

nothing and which lacked integrity.

The Debussy-Guiraud debate could also be interpreted as a

confrontation between the precepts of utility and fairness. A

similar debate, well-worn in legal-theoretical discussion,

centers on the question of collective equality vs. individual

liberty. Here Guiraud would have weighed in as an equalist and

averred that one listener’s isolated gratification threatens the

right that all people have to share equally in listening

pleasure. Debussy’s chord parallelism would present, in this

view, a kind of civic danger in the same way that an individual

who disregards civil law poses a threat to the society that does

observe it. In offering the following description of individual

obligation within a system of legal governance, the Oxford legal

positivist H.L.A. Hart presented a view much like Guiraud’s:

“When any number of persons conduct a joint enterprise according

to rules, and thus restrict their liberty, those who have

submitted to these restrictions when required have a right to

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similar submission from those who have benefited by their

submission.”22

This brief Guiraud-Debussy exchange shows a prime architect

of 20th-century modernism explicitly denying tonality’s

generalizability out of respect for the pleasurable specificity

that he found in evading functional tonality. It is the composer

who emphasizes individual compositional choice over the dictates

of theory. To take a slightly different legal perspective, we

might say Guiraud worked from a type of civil-law basis and

Debussy from some kind of musical equivalent to common law: the

former operating by statutes and the latter by legal precedent,

the first applying the general to the specific and the second

trying to relate specific case to specific case. Thus tonal

theory and analysis work much like the legal system,

generalization enabling assessment of specific examples and

individual cases lending authority to relevant theoretical

generalizations.

22 Hart, “Are There Any Natural Rights?”, Philosophical Review vol.64 (1955), p.185; cited by Matthew H. Kramer, “Legal and Moral Obligation,” in The BlackwellGuide to the Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory, p.180.

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Roughly 40 years after Schenker, and 60 years after

Debussy’s remarks, Milton Babbitt described the same kind of

musical-aesthetic opposition between the generalizable and the

particular as a contrast between “communality” and

“contextuality.”23 The conflict can be described similarly as a

fight between the singular impetus as it faces up to the more

general urge to preserve and defend meaning. Spoken of in these

terms, the argument starts to take on distinct aspects of law in

the second sense defined above: as a code of civic behavior, a

way of maintaining the social fabric such that the individual is

valued by her openness to generality.

3. Schoenberg’s illegality

Modern European societies have long accepted illegality in

various forms, and have in fact built “a network of glorification

and blame” around it, according to Foucault. For centuries, such

23 Milton Babbitt, “The Composer as Specialist” (originally published in 1958 as “Who Cares if You Listen?”), reprinted and anthologized many times, for example in Composers on Modern Musical Culture: An Anthology of Readings on Twentieth-Century Music, ed. Bryan Simms (New York: Schirmer, 1999), pp.152-159.

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transgressions have indeed been instrumental in defining social

classes, giving rise to political movements, and charging

economies. Foucault described various varieties of illegality,

detailing forms of “open illegality,” “popular illegality,” and

even “necessary illegality.” The varieties of everyday

illegality can be measured by the many manners and degrees of

strictness, neglect, disregard, toleration, exemption, and

rescission by which civil laws are maintained or not

maintained.24 We might boil the many kinds of illegality down to

three basic types. (1) First, there are those deviations from

the law, deviations from the reason of the state, that are

paradoxically necessary for maintenance of the state. As

Foucault presented them, these are crucial for the exercise and

display of state or dominant power: the shape of power, as

described in the History of Sexuality or the opening of Discipline and

Punish, depends in part on the shape of deviance. The legal

actually depends on the illegal, allowing or even committing

illegalities in order to sustain and transform itself. Terrorism

and illegal immigration, as depicted by the mass media, represent24 Foucault, “Generalized Punishment” and “Illegalities and Delinquency,” pp.73-103, 257-292.

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two examples. (2) Second, there is the widespread violation that

the law is more or less helpless to penalize. File-sharing or

habitually driving 10% over the speed limit count as instances of

this type of illegality. (3) Third and last, we can speak of big

transgressions that break or reconfigure the whole relationship

between legal and illegal. If something about file-sharing

leaves the fundamental aspects of intellectual property law in

place, for example, bringing the mentally ill into the category

of rights-bearing-citizens was — or would be — a revolutionary

transgression.25

Foucault could almost have had the atonalist Schoenberg in

mind when he discussed one particularly common type of

illegality: delinquency, a border franchise cultivated by “least-

favoured strata” who stake out “a space of tolerance, gained by

force or obstinacy… this space was for them so indispensable a

condition of existence that they were often ready to rise up to

defend it.”26 According to Foucault, delinquency is “a

25 Jonathan Neufeld arrived at this particular tripartite description of illegality, as a summary of the various legalist discussions that unfolded in our correspondence.26 Foucault, “Generalized Punishment,” in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Random House, 1995), p.82.

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politically or economically less dangerous” form of illegality.

Eternally interstitial, it hovers somewhere between our first and

second categories of illegality — just as Schoenberg’s own tonal

digressions prove “secretly useful, at once refractory and

docile,” to borrow another of Foucault’s descriptions of

delinquency.27 The Viennese composer vociferously and repeatedly

declared himself delinquent in the Foucauldian sense, describing

himself as a least-favored musician who managed to find a measure

of tolerance - as opposed to love - “by force or obstinacy.”

Take, for example, his melancholy essay on “how one becomes

lonely” and his retort to someone’s question whether he was “this

notorious Schoenberg,” his reply being: “Nobody wanted to be,

someone had to be, so I let it be me.” If he was very much open

to performing the Schoenberg role in various senses, he was not

open to other forms of naming — and rejected, for example, the

popular label “atonal.”28 Somewhere in this dualism of

performance and non-performance, in his differing reactions to 27 Foucault, “Illegalities and Delinquency,” in Discipline and Punish, pp.278, 277.28 Schoenberg, “How One Becomes Lonely” and “New Music: My Music,” in Style and Idea, ed. Leonard Stein, trans. Leo Black (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975), pp.30-52, 104. “I find above all that the expression ‘atonal music,’ is most unfortunate - it is on a par with calling flying ‘the art of not falling,’ or swimming ‘the art of not drowning’”; “Hauer’s Theories,” in Style and Idea, pp. 210-211.

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the state’s referencing the delinquent as a pathologized subject,

we can understand Schoenberg’s complexities as post-legalist.

Schoenberg’s atonality, and more generally his obstinacy, is

more revealingly discussed in Foucauldian terms of delinquency

than in terms of revolution. Revolution represents an eruption

of widespread illegality in sense (3) above, a paradigm shift in

defining the law. But Schoenberg’s forcefulness was not an

instrument for bringing about a dodecaphonic musical utopia, a

new or improved state of legality. Rather, he desired a state of

perpetual illegality-within-legality. He gave a sense of what

this might mean specifically in musical terms, in the

Harmonielehre passage where he claims the generality of diatonic

tonality would be meaningless without the specific

particularities - the individual chords - that continually

conflict with it. He makes the point within a Foucauldian

description of power and governance:

Every chord, then, that is set beside the principal tone has at least asmuch tendency to lead away from it as to return to it. And if life, if a work of art is to emerge, then we must engage in this movement-generating conflict. The tonality must be placed in danger of losing its sovereignty; the appetites for independence and the tendencies toward mutiny must be given opportunity to activate themselves; one must

26

grant them their victories, not begrudging them an occasional expansion of territory. For a ruler can only take pleasure in ruling live subjects; and live subjects will attack and plunder.29

As a specific example of the tonal performative in

Schoenberg’s own discourse, let us consider his description of

what he called “floating” or “fluctuating tonality” (schwebende

Tonalität). The term, as Schoenberg used it, has a built-in and

ultimately useful manner of vagueness - about which more in a

moment. Brian Hyer takes it to refer to late Romantic music

where “moments of orientation towards the tonic become allusive

and fragmentary.” Hyer goes on to describe the opening of Tristan

und Isolde in such terms, using Schoenberg’s notion to help explain

how Wagner’s chromaticism exerted a profoundly particularizing

force on later composers:

In the historical wake of Tristan, music underwent an atomization in which non-tonal harmonies cluster around isolated dominants and tonics. This tonal disintegration has often been understood as a dissolution from within, an organic process in which the forces of melodic attraction that gave rise to tonality led to its inevitable destruction.30

29 Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, trans. Roy E. Carter (Berkeley and Los Angeles:University of California Press, 1983), p.151. 30 Brian Hyer, “Tonality,” In Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com./article/grove/music/28102 (accessed January 6, 2009). For Schoenberg’s own discussion, see his Theory of Harmony, pp.128-129.

27

On the other hand, Schoenberg described “suspended tonality”

(aufgehoben Tonalität) most specifically in a section on modulatory

function in the Harmonielehre, as a context where “from the outset

the tonic does not appear unequivocally, it is not definitive;

rather it admits the rivalry of other tonics alongside it. The

tonality is kept, so to speak, suspended, and the victory can

then go to one of the rivals, although not necessarily.”31

There seems little musical difference between notions of

tonal “suspension” and tonal “floating.” The semantics and

metaphorical aspect make the words ambiguous, and analysts quite

often confuse them, in fact.32 Schoenberg might seem to have

given theoretical context when he provided reasons for using the

term aufgehoben. But he gave neither act of analytical naming —

aufgehoben or schwebend — enough context or reasoning to show why it

might be explanatorily useful, and indeed made no attempt even to

define schwebende Tonalität. Couldn’t he just as easily have

referred to “concise,” “otiose,” “insolent,” “transitional,”

“compulsive,” “active,” or “centrifugal” types of tonality? And

31 Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, p.153.32 Murray Dineen, for one, uses them interchangeably in “Schoenberg’s Modulatory Calculations: Wn Fonds 21 Berg 6/III/66 and Tonality,” in Music Theory Spectrum Vol.27, No.1 (Spring 2005), pp.97-112.

28

aren’t his terms more useful on account of their heuristic

vagueness as for any specific application? More to the point,

these ambiguities only make the “fluctuating tonality” and

“suspended tonality” descriptors typical of tonal theory: to

utter either phrase is really to define and establish the tonal

style in question. Did these specific kinds of intervallic

interconnectedness or disconnectedness exist (apart from another

kind of a different description, say “extended tonality”) before

Schoenberg devised the terms, or did they in fact come about at

that very moment?

So Schoenberg doesn’t quite count as a revolutionizer of

law. In Dahlhaus’s view, his “emancipation of the dissonance,

which was not so much a qualitative leap logically resulting from

what had gone before as an arbitrary act, was not at all the mere

abolition of an old law and the introduction of a new one.” If

he wasn’t a revolutionary, his tonal descriptors and other music-

categorical statements make him a kind of prime mover, something

like the law-declaring sovereign that John Austin put at the

center of his mid-19th-century legal model. Schoenberg’s decree

is like a king’s — he constitutes the law in his utterance, he

29

does something, indeed makes something, with his statement.

Dahlhaus characterized him as a “decisionist” — someone with

remarkable decision-making power, an ability “to interpret the

diktat of the individual as that of history” without resorting to

“a systematic web of argument.” Dahlhaus then turns to theology

as the only explanatory context for Schoenberg’s decisionism:

The concept of an authority which is prophetic and moral, which judgesand which simply decides and does not engage in argument, is so unusualin aesthetics, however, that at first one involuntarily feels that thereligious pathos [in Schoenberg’s own writings]… has been assumedillegitimately…. The striking contrast between the compelling fact ofSchoenberg’s authority and the weakness and inadequacy of compositional— technical or historical — philosophical explanations forces one tohave recourse to theological categories, which do at least make somekind of orientation possible.33

As Austin understands it, the performative foregoes verbs of

argument or existence. It demonstrates, in short, that doing is

a different matter from saying - the performative brings

something about rather than arguing that something. Simply to

utter the performative is to do it: “I name this ship the Queen

Elizabeth,” “I do (take this woman to be my lawful wedded wife),”

“I give and bequeath my watch to my brother.” As Austin argues,

such performatives are neither true nor false: “I assert this as33 Dahlhaus, “Schoenberg’s Aesthetic Theology,” in Schoenberg and the New Music,trans. Derrick Puffett and Alfred Clayton (Cambridge and New York: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1989), pp.87, 90.

30

obvious and do not argue it. It needs argument no more than that

‘damn’ is not true or false.’”34

4. tonality as performative

Tonality, in large part because of its status as a supposed

communicative language, was long considered an agent of

possibility - especially after atonality arrived, by way of

contrast, as a negatively defined notion.35 With the way that

Schoenberg describes tonality, however, whether he’s writing as

decisionist or as law-promulgating sovereign, we find it

difficult to theorize or generalize much beyond the individual

moment: it seems more or less impossible to define a particular

tonal type that could prove widely useful. Each naming of a tonal

type, of whatever kind, cannot be accompanied by reasons showing

34 Austin, How to Do Things with Words, p.6.35 Schoenberg preferred the word "pantonal" over "atonal," the former an enabling word and the latter a prohibitive one. “In my Harmonielehre I have recommended that we give the term ‘pantonal’ to what is called atonal. By this we can signify: the relation of all tones to one another, regardless of occasional occurrences, assured by the circumstance of a common origin.” Schoenberg, “Problems of Harmony,” in Style and Idea: Selected Writings of Arnold Schoenberg, ed. Leonard Stein (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975), p.284.

31

it to be useful in explaining or classifying many works: the

reasons for the type are not defensible, or not readily

defensible, and we cannot argue about them based on all sorts of

evidence. As is occasionally pointed out, Schenker offered more

of a theory of genius than a theory of tonality: he defined a

paradigm by which musical greatness can be measured, and the

process of creative brilliance understood.36 Schenker’s theory

helps define the way each master composer proceeded, within each

piece, from universal background to middleground to entirely

unique foreground.

Musicologist Donald Mitchell, journeying deep into quasi-

Foucauldian notions of jurism and prohibition, understood

tonality as a kind of particularization rather than a defensible

theory. He shrewdly described tonality as a set of "myriad

concepts, admonitions and prohibitions... Composers have,

throughout its history, challenged its authority, reinterpreted

it, qualified, modified, defied, denied, reasserted it."37 As a

36 See for example, Nicholas Cook, “Foundations of the Schenker Project,” in The Schenker Project: Culture, Race, and Music Theory in Fin-de-siècle Vienna (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp.29-88.37 Mitchell, The Language of Modern Music (New York: St. Martins’ Press, 1963), p.53.

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result of such admonitions, prohibitions, and challenges and

reinterpretations of authority, there have come to be almost as

many types of tonality as there are composers, and the truth of

those tonal types comes with their declaration. Following a

similar line of thought, Bryan Simms writes of tonality, that

“there is no term in twentieth-century musical theory that has

received more varied interpretations...”38 William Thomson finds

that definitions of tonality “often begin to fog up in stylistic

peccadilloes, in metaphysics, or in tentative language suggesting

that, although simple as a precept, the wherewithal of tonality

is ineffably complex, its causes unfathomable.” To demonstrate

his point, he lists more than 40 of the “qualifiers” that

musicians have used over time to nuance ideas of tonality,

including among others: polar, extended, migrant, roving, micro,

anchoring, suspended, diatonic, chromatic, implicit, expanded,

incipient, super, and secret.39 To this list we could add the

terms devised by Wallace Berry in pursuit of what he calls a

“conjectural set of classifications of levels of significance of

38 Simms, Music of the Twentieth Century: Style and Structure, 2nd ed. (New York: Schirmer Books, 1996), p.57.39 Thomson, Tonality in Music: A General Theory (San Marino, Calif.: Everett Books, 1999), pp.6, 8.

33

tonal functions,” an inventory that would include - among others

- “irrelevant tonality?”, “tonality of ambivalent conventions,”

and “primitive (‘pedal’) tonality.”40

Tonality is almost infinitely particularized, especially

with 20th-century music. But we can go even further to say about

tonal music, as follows from its near-infinite particularization,

that it is largely constituted in the act of its description: to describe

a sub-type of tonal composition, to name its particular system of

contraventions against tonal “law,” is to comprise that sub-type.

Tonality, in short, is a performative in both J.L. Austin’s and

Judith Butler’s sense: as Butler might say, to perform a tonal

type is analogous to performing a gender.41 This places the

tonal endeavor equally with the historical, the heuristic, and

the imaginary. With his long list of tonalist terms, Thomson

points out the fact that tonality is, by virtue of the many

necessary “illegalities” of its practice, heavily word-bound - it

is in fact so caught up in words that verbal discourse goes

40 Berry, Structural Functions in Music (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1976), p.172.41 Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), pp.1-11; Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp.223-242.

34

beyond simply describing tonality to constituting it. The final

question then arises, and here we come to the gist both of

tonality’s performance and the performance of tonality, of

precisely where that tonal type resides: in the particular

relations and connections between notes of a score, in the name

itself, or in the Schoenbergian act of naming?

The question also arises of explanatory and heuristic value

in tonal classifications more generally. If Berry’s and

Thomson’s terms were conflated, we would come up with a

bewildering list showing just how non-theorizable and non-

replicable tonal descriptions can be. Many of these can seem

meaningful only for individual listeners after they have arrived

at their own sense of what the description means. Perhaps the

ultimate extension of such tonal categories are the coloristic

terms that composer Olivier Messiaen developed for musical

passages, “intellectual” rather than visual terms that showed

how, for him, “the same sound complex always engenders the same

color complex.”42 A passage of music might be “blue-orange” or,

42 Olivier Messiaen: Music and Color, Conversations with Claude Samuel, transl. E. Thomas Glasow (Portland, Ore.: Amadeus Press, 1994), p.167. Note that Messiaen parsed music into coloristic “analyses” not at the level of individual chords,but in shifting and more wide-spanning “sound complexes” that sound as if they

35

to turn to a moment he found more difficult to put into words,

“transparent sulphur yellow with mauve reflections.” As Messiaen

used them, these descriptions were detailed and indeed analytic —

and could represent vivid and definitive tools of tonal analysis

in the sense that they would encapsulate salient events and

orderings of such events, except that they would prove difficult

if not impossible to teach or transfer to other listeners. All

this is not to argue that descriptions of tonality are arbitrary

and meaningless, quite the opposite: they have perhaps too much

meaning, which is why we have so many of them. But it is easy to

forget just where such meanings reside and what importance they

have. We could adapt Judith Butler’s analysis of the

performative aspect to the obstetrician’s statement and, after

making appropriate apologies, say of a specific musical

composition: “it’s a tonality,” “it’s an atonality,” or more

realistically, “it’s a certain kind of tonality, namely a

fluctuating (primitive, micro, migrant, irrelevant, polar, purple

with gold spots, etc.) tonality,” and add that the tonality of

any one composition “never fully approximates the norm.”43

were in fact comparable to tonal spans.43 Butler, Bodies that Matter, p.232.

36

Moving now from J.L. Austin to John Searle’s rather more

detailed analysis of “illocutionary acts,” we arrive at the more

specific question of whether performative statements on a

particular composition’s tonality represent assertions or

declarations.44 Both are types of performatives. A declaration

occurs when I name something (as in Butler’s obstetrician

example), while an assertion happens whenever I commit to the

truth of what I say. The namers of a ship hold the authority

necessary to declare, as a brand-new fact, that “this is the Queen

Mary” while I, as an impressed bystander, might later assert more

redundantly to a companion that “this is the Queen Mary.” To

judge from the title pages of printed music from the common

practice period, composers and publishers are more like

shipbuilders than ship-spotters, and their statements of tonality

true declaratives rather than assertions. Beethoven’s title page

for his Op.21 christens that work “Symphony No.1 in C Major,”

and of course such unions of title and key were more or less

44 Searle, “A Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts,” in Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp.1-29.

37

universal - made on most every title page across the common-

practice era.

Why was it thought desirable for the title page to announce

the key of the piece, its specific tonal sub-type? The musicians

don’t need to know the key because they have the key signatures

in the score, of course, so the declaration would seem to be some

sort of extramusical effort. To declare the key up-front in such

a way was to introduce the work, to make a useful capsule

statement about its character and identity. Musicians - and

listeners more generally - were more sensitive to the array of

key characteristics two centuries or even one century ago than

they are now. For Beethoven to advertise a composition as being

“in F Major” would give notice to potential listeners or players

that the work might well follow a pastoral-style topos, have a

movement imitating the 6/8 metrical topos of water, and have a

specific degree of brightness. In short, such declarations of

key helped to fill out a listener’s understanding of an

instrumental work. In this sense, Brian Hyer points out the

importance of the English word “key” as an indication of a

piece’s character: “as a metaphorical ‘key’, the tonic ‘unlocks’

38

or clarifies the arrangement of pitch relations that underlies

the music. A tonic thus unifies and coordinates the musical

phenomena within its reach: in the key of C major, for example,

there is an essential ‘C-ness’ to the music.”45

But doesn’t all this argue against the possibility of

individual tonal performatives? Might “an essential ‘C-ness’”

somehow preclude a full measure of “essential Beethoven-ness”?

Or perhaps basic statements of key are somehow negotiable within

expressive parameters? Title pages do make key declarations, but

at the same time individual listeners and performers — while

generally falling in with composers’ or publishers’ tonal

declaratives — can make their own tonal assertions and hold to

them fairly strongly. Even in the standard repertory, a title-

page declaration of key can be questionable. Why does the

printed music declare Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony to be in C Minor

rather than C Major? Is the music’s starting point more

important than where it ends? In the Fifth, minor wins out over

major in terms of sheer numbers of measures, but is musical

character something to be measured with a yardstick? And when

45 Brian Hyer, “Tonality.”

39

Beethoven does “resolve” to major — after making an unexpected

turn-back and a second resolution — there is no more purposeful

victory in all music. And why is Mahler’s Fifth, to cite an even

more extreme example, said to be in C-Sharp Minor when D major

has already decisively arrived by the start of the third

movement? Clearly, a minor key indication has a narrative aspect

for both Beethoven and Mahler: by disregarding the music’s

passage from darkness to light, per aspera ad astra, it refuses to

reveal ahead of time how the story ends. Describing either work

as C Major might seem to negate their dark passage, their

triumph-of-the-soul aspect.

Both assertions and declarations are shaped by influence,

tradition, and social conditions. Tonal performative statements

in particular remain largely generic, backward-looking, and

limited overall — especially in a busy world where few people

have the time, interest, or technical know-how to discuss finer

nuances of key. While the average American has a vocabulary of

perhaps five thousand words, title pages of most art music

written between about 1650 and 1900 restrict their tonal

assertions to the tiny and archaic descriptive vocabulary of the

40

twelve major and twelve minor keys. Saying “this symphony is in

D major” is therefore a different, much more formulaic

declarative than saying “this ship is named Titanic.”

Schoenberg’s appropriation of the non-musical words “hovering”

and “suspended” to describe tonal types shows him trying to reach

beyond this very small, 24-item tonal lexicon. Benjamin Boretz

was likely referring to such extension of analytic performatives

when he talked about how “musicians of Schoenberg’s generation

and the next were forced to understand the nature of musical

systems, beyond the attributes of particular systems, and thus to

become able to perceive any given system not as a musical

universal but as a musical choice.”46

How true and sincere — in short, how personal — are tonal

declarations? A good deal less so than naming a ship, it seems.

46 The present essay was written in ignorance of Boretz’s classification of music analytical statements as “attributive” rather than “descriptive.” I thank one of my reviewers for mentioning an affinity between this idea of an analytic-attributive, which Boretz developed in the 1970s as an extension of Milton Babbitt’s notion of contextuality, and my own tonal-particularistic notion. However, the closest parallels I have found in our thinking, as regards relating speech-act theory specifically to tonality, surface in the Boretz quote given above and in his following statement: “…the crisis in music which people talk about as having occurred at the end of the nineteenth century may be understood as the moment when the inadequacies of existing descriptive theory were brutally exposed by the faltering of available attributive theory.” Boretz, “Musical Cosmology,” Perspectives of New Music, vol. 15, no. 2 (1977), pp.127-128.

41

What Culler says of the performative in principle, could also be

said of the tonal declaration: that it “breaks the link between

meaning and the intention of the speaker.”47 Outwardly expressed

performative statements, as Austin described them, cannot be said

to represent “reports, true or false, of the performance of

inward and spiritual acts.”48 In short, the performative

obscures expression with a layer of convention — an aspect that

that, in the case of tonality, stands with the historical but

outside any common notions of expressive sincerity. That

convention entails restriction: tonal discourse can’t

satisfactorily be described as a form of declaration, just as

christening a ship from a list of only 24 names wouldn’t count as

declaration. When Beethoven wrote his Symphony No.2 in D Major,

to arbitrarily pick an example, he took on a certain set of pitch

and interval conventions that go under the name of “D Major.”

Following Austin, we might say that this D-major aspect doesn’t

necessarily report on the composer’s “inward acts.” Of course

Beethoven, to return to Donald Mitchell’s statement on tonality,

47 Culler, “Performative Language,” p.97.48 J.L. Austin, “Performative Utterances,” in Philosophical Papers, 3rd edition, ed.J.O. Urmson and G.J. Warnock (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), p.236.

42

“challenges, reinterprets, qualifies, modifies, defies, denies,

and reasserts” the set of D-major tonal conventions over the

course of the symphony itself. But that is a separate issue, one

that doesn’t lie at the center of tonality as I am discussing it

here, namely as a public discourse.

The tonality declarative, given its small and backward-

looking set of descriptives, becomes a more complex, and indeed

political, issue with twentieth-century music. Among the

influential composers of that century, Stravinsky was perhaps the

one who shadow-boxed most actively with the composer’s

traditional, or indeed Romantic role as expresser of musical-

aesthetic truths. And so, it is with performative politics in

mind that we should read the curious prepositional phrase in the

title of Stravinsky’s Symphony in C (1940). This is a quite rare

kind of declaration and semantics from this composer, and one he

must have intended as a provocation and a pose — as much a self-

conscious, after-the-fact historical assertion as it was a

compositional declaration. “The ‘in C’ is a little provocative,”

writes Paul Griffiths of Stravinsky’s designation,

43

a little unreal, a little too emphatic. The real title would have to besomething more like ‘Symphony in C with the first inversion as root chord and correspondingly with Phrygian leanings’ - although any such qualifications apply only to particular sections, so that even this title would have to flicker and change as the work proceeds.49

Griffiths interrogates the description further, pointing out that

Stravinsky did not create all tonality or key indications equal.

This composer was free in his neoclassical phase to individualize

tonal statements in many different ways: one passage could be

“on” C with the next one grounding itself more committedly “in”

C; chords could be substituted for the usual cadential dominant

chords; the composer could give a general impression of speaking

idiomatically within a tonality, but with a kind of foreign

accent that both personalizes the tonality and sets himself apart

from it. “As with the Serenade in A,” Griffiths continues in his

discussion of Stravinsky’s symphony, “the preposition in the

title is highly charged with meaning, but differently. It is not

that the specified note is an axis and final instead of a tonic,

but rather that it is a tonic in an unconventional sense, an

ironic tonic.” The question then arises of just what kind of

identity or set of identities C major represented for Stravinsky

49 Griffiths, Stravinsky (New York: Schirmer, 1992), pp.124-125.

44

- as composer and, more inscrutably, as man - in this particular

composition. “The Symphony may exist on split levels…,”

Griffiths writes. “It is not a case of face and mask, as in

Pulcinella, but of separate faces, or of separate masks which have

become indistinguishable from faces: if C major is a pose or a

prison, it is one that Stravinsky has chosen and made his own,

partly by changing its shape.”50

Without quite getting into them, Griffiths approaches

important semantic questions over musical qualities. We could

continue his line of thinking and ask: what kind of verb is

involved in a declaration of tonality, whether in the composer’s

mind or on the title page of the final composition? Does

Stravinsky’s title “Symphony in C” really say “this symphony is in

C major,” or does it say something more oblique about C major and

this composition? Illocutionary acts become even more complex

when we move from making statements about the everyday world to

saying things about artworks, an illocutionary situation where

any factuality becomes murky at best. There is a clear

presumptiveness and habitual avoidance of verbs in the prefaces

50 Griffiths, Stravinsky, p.123.

45

and titles to artworks, perhaps in implicit assumption that

declarative statements are as much anathema to aesthetics as is

pure representation: James McNeill Whistler’s painting carries

the title The Artist’s Mother, not a declarative sentence like The

Artist’s Mother Looks Like This.

5. situating the tonal performative

If performatives contain no truth that theory can prove or

disprove, if they are as individual and particular as I have

described them, then why do some survive and flourish within the

discourse and others not? Why have “implicit,” “incipient,” and

“super” failed to catch on as tonal declarations or assertions

while Schoenberg’s “fluctuating” and “suspended” have lived on?

Austin says that the performative commonly “masquerade[s] as a

statement of fact,” and that such dissimulation is the very time

that it “oddly enough… assumes its most explicit form.

Grammarians have not, I believe, seen through this ‘disguise,’

46

and philosophers only at best incidentally.”51 This suggests

that the answers to my questions might lie less with the

feasibility of the performatives themselves than with their

creators. If the performative represents, as Culler puts it,

“the acts of language that transform the world, bringing into

being the things that they name,” then Schoenberg was a master of

the performative. This is just how Dahlhaus understood

Schoenberg when he called him a musical “decisionist”: as a

creator whose pronouncements and actions worked inextricably

together, the declarations as actions and the actions as

declarations.

An important question remains. Why would tonality count as

performative when meter or rhythmic organization, for instance,

would not? Surely all aspects of the western art music tradition

involve regulation and contravention, surely all have a hand in

individual musical style? Two responses come to mind, that

tonality is (1) the most easily, variously, and copiously though

51 Austin, How to Do Things with Words, p.4, n.2. Especially revealing in this context, given my own discussion of musical “law” and the surrounding discourse, is Austin’s assertion that people involved in law and the legal profession “should be best aware of the true state of affairs” when it comes to their own language. But this is not the case: “they will succumb to theirown timorous fiction, that a statement of ‘the law’ is a statement of fact.”

47

ambiguously verbalized aspect of Western art music and, not

coincidentally, also (2) the aspect that has incited the most

rule-making. Ideologues and composers of the Western art-music

tradition haven’t seen fit to invoke laws with regard to rhythm,

and William Thomson would have found it difficult to draw up a

list of 40 qualifiers to describe individual compositional

approaches to rhythm and rhythmic patterning. Yet those working

in Western art-music traditions tend to have deeply hierarchical

understandings of pitch and tend to group themselves

compositionally, aesthetically, and historically according to

issues of pitch. Pitch, in short, is the more socializable

aspect: in just about any system of scales or tonalities, there

arise various levels of potential that come to reflect Western

beliefs in hierarchy, how tension should relate to relaxation,

and how the mind should connect to the body. I believe Leonard

Meyer was the first to differentiate between primary and

secondary parameters in music - the first syntactical and

arranged in class relationships, and the second statistical and

non-hierarchical. Pitch is primary in this sense, and can

encompass dominant and secondary-dominant relationships, while

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the secondary aspect of timbre is more a matter of relativity,

statistics, and subjective “feel” than of rules and classlike

relationships.52

Tonal music is certainly not unitary when seen against the

reality of individual musical practice, and the very term “tonal

theory” is nonsensical insofar as there is no particular

hypothesis that such a theory could involve. If tonality is more

oriented to performativity than it is beholden to theory,

statements on tonality are not the only performatives in musical

discourse. There are others, including general style labels like

“impressionist,” “mannerist,” “expressionist,” “neoromantic,”

“modernist,” and so on - particularizations that involve naming

and identity formation as much as they involve politics,

subjective insinuation, identity, and wishful thinking. But

those usually don’t involve the hidden agencies of power, the

52 “The syntax of tonal music, like other kinds of syntax, is rule-governed, learned, and conventional. The secondary, statistical parameters, on the other hand, seem able to shape experience with minimal dependence on learned rules and conventions.” Meyer, Style and Music: Theory, History, and Ideology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), p.209; Meyer discusses the primary-secondary duality itself in more detail on pp.14-16 of the same volume. This duality of primary and secondary parameters — and theircontrasting degrees of culturedness, for that is the final ramification of Meyer’s comparison between systematic and non-systematic — must be the reason that Stravinsky and Bartók, and other 20th-century art-music composers who foregrounded rhythm, are commonly called expressionists or primitivists.

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cultures of legality and transgression, and traditional

substantiations, that the tonal references do. As stylistic and

historical heuristics, they are significant in some ways. They

don’t, however, have the reach of the tonalist discourse: they

are attempts to dissect style laterally, as it were. But tonal

performatives are implicitly hierarchical constructions of

conceptual and historical depth, a legacy of the powerful law

conceptions that dominated three centuries of tonal history.

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