Debussy and the Crisis of Tonality
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Auteurs : Roland NadeauSource :
- Music educators journal [ 0027-4321 ] ; 1979-09.
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DOI: 10.2307/3395721
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<contrib-group><contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Nadeau</surname><given-names>Roland</given-names></name><aff>Professor of music at Northeastern University in Boston.</aff></contrib></contrib-group>
<pub-date pub-type="ppub"><month>09</month><year>1979</year></pub-date><volume>66</volume><issue>1</issue><fpage>69</fpage><lpage>73</lpage><custom-meta-wrap><custom-meta xlink:type="simple"><meta-name>sagemeta-type</meta-name><meta-value>Journal Article</meta-value></custom-meta><custom-meta xlink:type="simple"><meta-name>search-text</meta-name><meta-value> Debussy and the Crisis Tonality Roland Nadeau With the exception of jazz, no twentieth-century music style has shaken the Western tradition more than what is commonly called atonality. Jazz may have rocked the social foundations of the con-certgoing public, but Viennese atonality attacked the very7 roots of our aesthetic experience by questioning the need for tonality itself.1 For over fifty years, atonalists, including several composers of unmistakable genius, have systematically pursued both free and controlled atonal chromaticism while waging a strong campaign for wider support and understanding of their ideas. Yet this pursuit of atonality, which began in the 1920s and which has long been considered the major music movement of this century, no longer appears as such. Instead, the crucial impact of Debussy's harmonic breakthrough, resulting from his broadened application of tonality, is becoming increasingly apparent. ‘The Harvard Dictionary of Music gives a general but proper definition of tonality: “Loyalty to a tonic, in the broadest sense of the word.”The mistaken association of the term exclusively with the major/minor key system leads to muddled thinking about ancient, exotic, and twentieth-century musics. The use of the term in this article, unless qualified, refers to any of its many possible applications, to ancient and exotic musics as well as to the dissonant contemporary styles of Bartok, Hindemith, and others. The author is professor of music at Northeastern University in Boston. This article is abstracted from his forthcoming hook, Debussy: The Crisis of Tonality, to he published by Northeastern University Press in 1980. 69 Schoenberg and tonality When viewed from an evolutionary perspective, the development of homophony/polyphony, culminating in tonal synthesis at the hands of Debussy and other significant twentieth-century composers, sheds light on what appears to be a colossal misadventure—what Arnold Schoenberg dubbed “pan-tonality,”more commonly known as “atonali-ty,”but more aptly called “non-tonality.”It was a misadventure because the technique of nontonal composition has not sustained the hopes of its adherents for a brilliant future: not only has nontonality failed to be generally accepted by the public, but in recent years its practitioners have greatly declined in influence. The theoretician Rudolph Reti speaks of the false expectations of the great Schoenberg disciple, Alban Berg: This author remembers how some thirty years ago he was told by Alban Berg—and the words still ring in his ears—that in a few decades “our music will sound as natural and simple as Mozart's sounds today.”The decades have passed and Berg's music has held its place but his words have not come true. Because his music was from the beginning not meant to be like Mozart's but was intended to reflect the tense excesses and, in fact, morbidity of our age. This difference in intention is in itself not a criterion of a greater or lesser artistic value or, to be perhaps more exact, of a greater or lesser artistic master}7. And as for Berg, he managed—and this points to his greatness—to blend his and his time's tendency towards excess and conflict with an immanent longing for beauty and harmony. In the music of other composers close to him the negative forces were much less challenged.2 Sartre put it more succinctly: “Schoenberg is farther removed from the workers than Mozart was from the peasants.”3 The average concertgoer, bombarded for over fifty years by the polemics of the atonalists and exposed to their music through concerts, radio, and recordings, has not grown accustomed to its stridencies. Significantly, the public has accepted many works of other twentieth-century composers such as Stravinsky, Bar- 2Rudolph Reti, Tonality in Modern Music (New York: Collier Books, 1962), p. 90. 3Jean-Paul Sartre, Situations (New York: Fawcett Publications Inc., 1965), p. 144. tok, Britten, and Prokofiev, works that in many cases are heavily dissonant, although within an expanded use of tonality. Nontonality was a misadventure with particularly tragic consequences for less successful composers in the nontonal idiom. Unlike the originators of the system, who were men of genius, many less talented atonalists lost aesthetic balance; the system encouraged the conceptual side of their art at the expense of the perceptual. To put it more simply, they thought out compositions without feeling them. Some musicians, quite likely talented and inclined to composition, have become discouraged and given up composition altogether in the face of a highly organized system they believed to be good but could not experience perceptually. Schoenberg did not lack ability and inspiration. He was a brilliant personality with powerful convictions, possessed of an intensely musical mind on the order of genius. His idealism derived from the German tradition in the line of J. S. Bach, through the Classicists and early Romantics, and culminating in the music dramas of Wagner and the symphonies of Bruckner. This historical progression of styles within a single tradition, representing in aggregate one of the greatest collections of works of art in any era, paralleled closely the evolution of conventional major/minor tonality, from its codification in Rameau's time to its richly chromatic and dissonant phase in the late nineteenth century. Schoenberg, a direct heir to this legacy and awed by its magnificence, reluctantly made certain assumptions about the current state of his own tradition. He assumed that tonality had run out and was incapable of producing new music. He thought that a new and different structural order was needed if the Western tradition were to evolve further. This perception was not true. Tonality as a generating principle had in fact not died; it was its application through the major/minor key system that had waned. Within the German harmonic convention—Schoenberg's tradition— the only fully explored and possibly depleted tonal resource was that of the major/minor system of keys with its attendant homophonic and polyphonic textures. The Western tonal tradition, however, is larger than its central major/minor manifestation in the German tradition. There was already superb music somewhat outside this tradition by composers such as Berlioz, Chopin, Verdi, and Mussorgsky. Within their styles, exotic and ancient tonal resources often were explored as generators of fresh expressions, always within the matrix of tonality. Schoenberg, although aware of these important currents, entirely missed their significance for the crisis of twentieth-century music. As a young composer, he had experienced intensely the depleted state of major/minor key-based tonality. Along with Richard Strauss, Mahler, Max Reger, and other late Romantics, he had inherited from Wagner the dying embers of the key system. Schoenberg fanned these into markedly chromatic yet tonal works such as Verkldrte Nacht, Op. 4 (1899), and Gurrelie-der (1900-11). At this point in his creative life, Schoenberg, keenly aware of the evolutionary nature of Western music and the need to go on but too honest and idealistic to repeat himself further in a tonal style he felt to be impotent, sought a new direction. His role was to be messianic: he must provide a solution that would guarantee the further evolution of a tradition. This new direction would be approached first through anarchical nontonality in works such as Sects kleine Klavierstucke, Op. 19 (1911), and fully realized later in highly controlled nontonal serialism. Synthesis, by definition, necessarily involves the continuation of forces from the past tradition. Schoenberg's second assumption was that certain grouped elements historically associated with tonal music could continue to operate without tonality. Schoenberg retained certain grouped elements for synthesis: the conventional tempered system of twelve chromatic pitches, conventional instruments, conventional durational values and rhythmic patterns, conventional forms, and polyphonic and homo-phonic textures. These were to be divorced from tonality, as Schoenberg understood it—the evolved major/minor key system. Schoenberg's second assumption was high ly questionable. Because tempered pitch and associated groupings of conventional structural elements were integral to tonality, they could not easily be disassociated from the prior generating force. Reti has stated, “Now in the widest sense every kind of tonality is based on pitches, for tonality is a phenomenon creating structural units by centering a phrase, a group or a whole piece on a basic note from which the group usually begins, with which it ends and to which the ear relates each part of it.”4 Beyond this operant, functional role of the tonic pitch within a tonal field, each pitch is also the focus of a series of overtones. Because the hierarchy of intervals within the overtone series parallels the hierarchy of intervals in conventional tonal homophony, it is not impossible to consider the single pitch itself as a momentary, microcosmic field of harmonic tonality. Pitchless or near-pitchless compositions—such as Varese's Ionization—avoid the issue of tonality because tonality obviously cannot exist without pitch. And pitched compositions, when they include structural elements radically transformed (such as when Cage “prepares”a piano) need not be tonal. In this case conventional pitch is no longer of paramount concern; the crucial structural element is timbre, drastically transformed. The issue is not whether all pitched compositions can exist without tonality; it is whether or not strictly nontonal but pitched compositions, using all the basic structural elements historically associated with tonality, are valid. It becomes increasingly clear from the Schoenberg legacy that they are not. Schoenberg's negation of the tonal principle, while appropriating its articulating elements for new synthesis, was innately abortive. What gave meaning to this group of articulating elements was the a priori force called tonality. Most non-tonal composition was doomed to a Frankenstein-like existence: all the parts were present, but without the animating principle or soul. Thus Schoenberg, possessor of a prodigious, original technique, not only misunderstood the fundamental character of tonality but the relationship of tonality to its articulating elements. What Schoenberg correctly grasped was that a new synthesis was necessary. What he failed to grasp was that a new tonal synthesis was at hand, its constituent elements coalesced, ripe for the taking. This synthesis would reconcile ripened chromatic technology with fresh tonal resources. Claude Debussy was mainly responsible for this synthesis. Debussy's synthesis In his late twenties, Debussy was critically aware of the state of the Romantic musical art. He was thoroughly acquainted with the ideas and music of Wagner and Liszt and with the French application of their theories in the work of Franck, Chausson, and others. He had undergone thorough training at the Paris Conservatoire in conventional music knowledge and application. He knew the classics, played the piano well enough, and excelled at keyboard improvisation. Superior in solfege and score-reading, he had developed a superb ear. Added to his conservatory training were other influences. He had been exposed to Russian music, in part through his trips to Russia with Mme. Meek. During his stay in Italy for the Prix de Rome, he had met Liszt and heard him play. While there he heard and marvelled at the sacred music of the sixteenth century, particularly that of Palestrina and Las-sus. Impressionist and post-impressionist painting; art nouveau; symbolist poetry and prose; irreve-rant music voices such as that of Erik Satie, American popular music, and the Parisian music halls; and other products of artistic and intellectual ferment prodded Debussy to search for creative directions dif- ferent from that of the prevalent late Romanticism. At the Paris Exposition of 1889, he heard, for the first time, music of Eastern countries—music completely alien to the Western conventions. While he studied and loved Wagner's music dramas, it is significant that he also experienced and was deeply moved by these ancient, exotic musics clearly outside the German-dominated Romantic tradition. Later, he was to achieve a synthesis that would bring Wagner-influenced chromaticism to play on exactly these exotic and ancient music materials. Modal diatonicism was fused to late nineteenth-century chromatic connection and extension. Tonality extended It was through the chord that Debussy gradually discovered the structural foundations of his style. During his student years, within his early compositions and especially through his improvisations at the piano, Debussy explored extended, chromatically altered chords based on the seventh, ninth, eleventh, and thirteenth intervals. During a celebrated conversation at the piano with his teacher Ernest Guiraud, Debussy played a strange array of chords at the keyboard (see Figure 1). This group included chromatically altered sevenths and ninths progressing in an unconventional manner. These rough chordal happenings were not part of a composition, nor were they meant to be. What is important is that the young composer had experimented deeply with extended chords. The dialectical interaction of linear and vertical forces in homo-phony before Debussy is most 4f }}H1 it H Kl •U'i t i $*hl i idii 4Reti, Tonality in Modern Music, p. 95. Figure 1. Debussy played these chords at the piano during a conversation with his teacher Ernest Guiraud. From Edward Lockspeiser's Debussy: His Life and Umd(New York:Macmillan Co., 1962),p. 207. clearly manifested within the soprano/bass polarity. Although the bass was often made up from chord roots, it also had to articulate a reasonably interesting melodic contour, functioning at once as support for the main line above and as its counter line. The development of the theory of chord inversion was an accommodation to the necessity of the bass not only to support but also to achieve melodic interest as well. The theory of “good”or “bad”chordal progressions or in-tervallic successions arises out of a necessary polarity of distinctly melodic soprano and bass lines. Within conventional homophony the role of dissonance is plain. Since theorists had designated the common triad as the consonant chord in homophony, only the intervals of the octave, perfect fifth, and major and minor thirds (and their inversions) could be consonant. Other intervals were designated as dissonant, needing resolution to consonances. Each tone causing dissonance was considered a non-chord tone and designated by terms such as “passing tone,”“returning tone,”and “suspension.”The greater use of dissonance from period to period as a result of the dialectic of linear/vertical forces led to gradual normalization of seventh, ninth, eleventh, and thirteenth chords; each additional non-chord tone above the foundational triad became frozen into the chordal mass, the entire chord then being considered dissonant. Dissonant extended chords, most often dominant in function, normally resolved into a consonant triad. At the last stages of the evolution of extended chords, in the music of Wagner in particular, chords such as the ninth and eleventh no longer always resolved; their tension was either suspended or led in turn to other chordal tensions. The implications for the future of tonality were crucial. Because chordal tensions in Wagner's music, especially those of dominant function, often did not resolve conventionally, the principle of tonic hegemony within the major/minor tonal system was greatly weakened; Wagner's endless chromatic modulation taxed the ear's ability to retain the sense of a single, overriding tonic. Certain composers within the following generation, notably Schoen-berg, felt that Wagner's harmonic process had exhausted the creative force of tonality. It was at this point that Debussy struck his new direction. He developed a chromatic, homophonic style that would retain tonic hege- mony, broadening it tremendously to accommodate a variety of tonal materials beyond major/minor. He did this by refuting the absolute need for the resolution of dissonant chords and, by extension, the need for the resolution of dissonant intervals. He used all possible chromatic and diatonic harmonic intervals, not as consonances or dissonances, but as part of a graded hierarchy of vertical tensions subservient only to generating chord roots within a broadened field of tonality. Tense intervals in Debussy are spared the absolute necessity to resolve to relaxed intervals. Harmonic tensions in his scores sometimes do resolve to consonances, or rather, to other less tense intervals. However, just as often they do not resolve at all, moving to equally tense intervals, to tenser intervals, or simply dissolving (see Figure 2). It is this elimination of the fixed need for chordal or intervallic resolution, this open-ended chordal concept resulting in the free play of any chromatic interval above a root, that makes up the chromatic homophony of Debussy's mature style. It uses dissonance not, as many today still believe, as part of the process of tonality's destruction but to expand and extend its scope. t i --- i retenu // a tempo S i :sF 2 1,3 2 1 dim. molto PP m Figure 2. An example of Debussy's dissonant homophony from measures 43-49 of “La serenade interrompue”(“Preludes, book 1, no. 9 [1910], Broekmans and Van Poppel edition). The chord in measure 44 can be read either as a chromatically altered thirteenth chord on a B-flat root, or as an example of Debussy's use of the poly chord (C major triad in close position over a B-flat minor triad in open position). The minor thirteenth chord on the root E-natural in measure 46 resolves to an A minor triad in the following measure. However, its repetition (last beat of measure 47) does not resolve; it simply dissolves. When Debussy discovered that in a context of tonality the power of a securely anchored, deep root would allow for any selection from twelve possible chromatic tones above, with each chord or interval open to all options, the way was open to entirely new harmonic combinations. All dissonant extended chords, with all possible chromatic alterations, were now possible, the composer having the option to resolve or not to resolve. Chords now could be used for their color as well as for their harmonic function. Because dissonance no longer needed resolution, voice-leading with its primary dependence on contrary and oblique melodic motion could be set aside if desired. Parallelism of all chords and all intervals was now possible. Since the binding polarity of soprano/bass and voice-leading in general was no longer of primary concern, Debussy expanded the role of various pedal points and os-tinato techniques to provide structural cohesion. Gradually, Debussy began to see in this grid of chromatic inflection the solvent for an enlarged tonality embracing melodic/harmonic interchange, ancient and exotic modes, the whole tone scale, polyharmony, pandiatonicism, rootless chords, and so on. Experimentation and innovation were not possible without aesthetic anarchy, because Debussy knew that what is valid in any new creative idiom must retain what still matters in older idioms. Debussy's influence Unlike Schoenberg, Debussy did not theorize publicly. There were no intimate disciples at his feet; no school grew up around him. While both important and less important composers of the day made use of the more obvious Debussian techniques, there were no procedural handouts, no doctrines; there was only the evidence of the compositions themselves that showed that new roads lay ahead. His music was a catalyst and a link, pointing to fresh possibilities for harmony within a broadened application of Western tonality. There seems to be little foundation for the belief that Debussy's attenuation of traditional major/minor tonality and his emancipation of dissonance led the way to non- tonal composition. On the contrary, the originality of Debussy's music established the obligation for those after him to find their own directions. Major composers of the early twentieth-century mainstream such as Bartok, Stravinsky, Kodaly, and many others, while not assimilating his style and aesthetics, derived from him important threads for the development of their own harmonic styles. Bartok has described his debt to Debussy: [Debussy] restored a feeling for chords to all musicians. He was as important as Beethoven who revealed to us progressive form, and as Bach who introduced us to the transcendence of counterpoint. I always ask myself, could one make a synthesis of these three masters and create a vital contemporary style?5 Debussy's harmonic innovations were not his only contribution to twentieth-century composition, though they were the most crucial. No major composer can thoroughly transform a single element of composition without drastically altering related elements as well. For example, Beethoven's transformation of classical forms into structures of dynamic force and power necessitated a new use of harmony and dynamics, rhythm, orchestration, and timbre. Every structural element in Debussy's mature style was rejuvenated. Chords freed from the absolute need to articulate functional tonal argument were able to exist as colored pitch masses. Similarly, the instruments of his orchestra were combined into shimmering new timbres, important chiefly for their color. The connection Debussy made between chord-as-color and timbre-as-color in his orchestral works has been assimilated by later generations of composers. Debussy also reexamined melody, sometimes referring to it as “the surface of harmony,”implying a oneness of chord and line. This oneness is strikingly apparent in his parallel chord bands: each melodic pitch surfaces out of each chord, and the chord band as a whole functions solely as thickened melody. The Debussian fusion of chord and line anticipates by several years the experiments of Varese, who, in 1936, said: ‘Quoted in Peter S. Hansen, An Introduction to Twentieth Century Music, third edition (Boston: Al-lyn and Bacon, Inc., 1971), p. 223. When new instruments will allow me to write music as I conceive it, the movement of sound-masses, of shifting planes, will be clearly perceived in my work, taking the place of linear counterpoint. … There will no longer be the old conception of melody or interplay of melodies. The entire work will be a melodic totality. The entire work will flow as a river flows.6 In matters of form, Debussy rejected outright all suggestions of classical directness and symmetry. Instead, he desired a spontaneous music, one that would express the impalpable, transient essence of things. Consistent with this he favored an asymmetrical, unpredictable phrase structure and form. His rhythm often flows freely, the bar-line seldom showing much influence, the metrical accentuation of secondary importance. Consequently, besides the profound influence he exercised on mainstream composers of the first half of the twentieth century by assuring the continuity of the Western tonal tradition, Debussy anticipated certain later trends in contemporary music—the objectified sound masses of Varese and Stockhausen; the development of new expressive timbres through modification of standard instruments, such as Cage's prepared piano or Pend-erecki's string writing; the creation of natural instruments by Harry Partch and others; new electronic media; the new exoticism of Mess-iaen; and the provisional, just-once qualities of aleatory works by Cage, Brown, Feldman, and others. Many of these approaches to composition, whatever their value, can be traced at least in part to Debussy's unique contributions. Schoenberg and his followers urged the need for a system of composition that was consciously and thoroughly nontonal. The music of Debussy, on the contrary, showed that the tonal principle, when broadened to include materials other than major/minor diaton-ics and articulated by new harmonic textures, timbres, rhythms, and forms, could lead to a wide variety of innovative expressions used for several decades. The debt Western musicians owe to Debussy is thus enormous. ID 6Elliot Schwartz and Barney Childs, eds., Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967), p. 197. </meta-value></custom-meta></custom-meta-wrap></article-meta></front></article></istex:document></istex:metadataXml><mods version="3.6"><titleInfo lang="en"><title>Debussy and the Crisis of Tonality</title></titleInfo><titleInfo type="alternative" lang="en" contentType="CDATA"><title>Debussy and the Crisis of Tonality</title></titleInfo><name type="personal"><namePart type="given">Roland</namePart><namePart type="family">Nadeau</namePart><affiliation>Professor of music at Northeastern University in Boston.</affiliation></name><typeOfResource>text</typeOfResource><genre type="research-article" displayLabel="research-article" authority="ISTEX" authorityURI="https://content-type.data.istex.fr" valueURI="https://content-type.data.istex.fr/ark:/67375/XTP-1JC4F85T-7">research-article</genre><originInfo><publisher>SAGE Publications</publisher><place><placeTerm type="text">Sage CA: Los Angeles, CA</placeTerm></place><dateIssued encoding="w3cdtf">1979-09</dateIssued><copyrightDate encoding="w3cdtf">1979</copyrightDate></originInfo><language><languageTerm type="code" authority="iso639-2b">eng</languageTerm><languageTerm type="code" authority="rfc3066">en</languageTerm></language><relatedItem type="host"><titleInfo><title>Music educators journal</title></titleInfo><genre type="journal" authority="ISTEX" authorityURI="https://publication-type.data.istex.fr" valueURI="https://publication-type.data.istex.fr/ark:/67375/JMC-0GLKJH51-B">journal</genre><identifier type="ISSN">0027-4321</identifier><identifier type="eISSN">1945-0087</identifier><identifier type="PublisherID">MEJ</identifier><identifier type="PublisherID-hwp">spmej</identifier><part><date>1979</date><detail type="volume"><caption>vol.</caption><number>66</number></detail><detail type="issue"><caption>no.</caption><number>1</number></detail><extent unit="pages"><start>69</start><end>73</end></extent></part></relatedItem><identifier type="istex">4E2435C4CE5A26471C978D3C1F799010041438EF</identifier><identifier type="ark">ark:/67375/M70-9F24RVTF-2</identifier><identifier type="DOI">10.2307/3395721</identifier><identifier type="ArticleID">10.2307_3395721</identifier><recordInfo><recordContentSource authority="ISTEX" authorityURI="https://loaded-corpus.data.istex.fr" valueURI="https://loaded-corpus.data.istex.fr/ark:/67375/XBH-0J1N7DQT-B">sage</recordContentSource></recordInfo></mods><json:item><extension>json</extension><original>false</original><mimetype>application/json</mimetype><uri>https://api.istex.fr/document/4E2435C4CE5A26471C978D3C1F799010041438EF/metadata/json</uri></json:item></metadata><serie></serie></istex></record>Pour manipuler ce document sous Unix (Dilib)
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