Sean's tonality ideas

[Sean]

I just wrote these up for an academic, who's kind-of impressed at the ideas but doesn't so much like the thing as a whole, of course... (It's called A Vedantic perspective on tonality ie informed by Indian philosophy)
Pt.1:

Life has fundamental dynamics, potentials or tendencies consisting in the gunas and providing meaning and structure from a necessarily pre-rational, intuitive and Dionysian base, lying in the interface between absolute consciousness and its experience of the relative world. They are poorly recognized by Western Apollonian civilization prioritizing instead norms reflecting the intellect's functioning and foregrounded, articulated understanding lying above the intuition, these cultures having the uneasy counterbalance of great artistic traditions as repositories for the displaced pre-rational aesthetic experience. Music is the greatest of the arts, having fullest sublimation of its medium or intellectually perceptible score into unmediated primary experience, and hence Western civilization's highest achievement.

Fundamental meaning is intellectually inscrutable as it has transcendental rather than rational or relational grounding and for harmony in music this means tonality and its correspondence with acoustics, there being necessary but intellectually unverifiable causal connection between acoustic and subjective consonance and dissonance. The comparable situation in painting is colours having light waves with relationships providing necessary subjective response toward their combinations, complementary or clashing, as indeed also with individual colour characteristics.

The distortion of the lines of Picasso's faces for instance has meaning because they are seen to be faces, the paintings' aesthetic content not just consisting in the play of pigment within abstract forms but has reference to perception of other given relations. And in literature words have fixed meanings which the play of words needs to refer to, and which is unable just to refer to an arbitrary system of meaning only contained within itself: the likes of Joyce, formalist abstract painting and non-tonality become intellectual and incomprehensible.

The material's play if not its wider form require alignment with these given subjective responses to find fundamental meaning or artistic unity, all as effectiveness in life and personal development require alignment with the gunas and avoidance of the self-consciousness and error of over-calculation, or putting intellect before intuition. Aesthetic content issues from artworks' operation in terms of their medias' objectively but improvably defined experiential characteristics- to try to ignore and step outside these denies art its humanity.

Manufactured external schemes assuming materials' relationships are engineered or dependent on culture rob them of transcendent reference: art's logic and meaning relate both to the real world and their own sphere of relations, uniting emotion and intellect and subject and object through the individual perceiving Self also being the universal underlying reality or Brahman. Cultural relativism's denial of truth and relating schemes of relations only to arbitrary networks of normative presuppositions is mistaken, indeed with some networks having more alignment with fundamental gunas and conducive to human advancement than others.

Acoustic consonance is a vibration comprising tones whose frequencies are related as ratios of small whole numbers, and dissonance of larger whole numbers, the sound waves' peaks coinciding either frequently or infrequently. Ratios of 2:1 for the octave, where two peaks of one tone are required before a peak coincides with one of the other, or 3:2 for the 5th, the two most consonant intervals, contrast with complex ratios like 16:15 for the minor 2nd or 9:8 for the 2nd. Ratios with numbers less than around 7 are acoustically, and in tonality subjectively, consonant, and more than 7, dissonant.

Simpler ratios were first associated with subjective consonance or psychological sensations of agreeableness or smoothness and more complex ratios with subjective dissonance or roughness or friction by 6th century BC Pythagoreans, following observations of pitches of vibrating strings having relations with their lengths. The Pythagorean tradition is then the view of the necessary equivalence in music of objective acoustics with subjective experience, object and subject indeed underwritten by the same substrate of Brahman. Moreover hearing is the primary sense in the Vedic tradition with its comparable concern for unity of sound with meaning in Sanskrit, hearing also being the sense least mediated by cognitive processes; vibrating strings and sound further compare with the gunas as lines of potential or meaning, while vibration is the quality of reality's finest levels in physics' superstring theory.

Of all harmonic systems it is Western tonality that most embodies the objective-subjective equivalence, taking the acoustically consonant, unusual intervals of especially 8ths, 5ths and 4ths as fundamental points of reference and positing them in relation to the dissonant, more common intervals of 7ths and 2nds, of secondary status only leading to the consonants. Tonality may on paper look like just another abstract harmonic scheme with its own internally consistent set of relationships to be taken up and normalized by society in theories of enculturation, but instead also has a natural grounding.

It has the highest level of correspondence between sensation and physics, with chords' importance being directly proportional to their degree of acoustic consonance: tonality is intuitively, ravishingly understandable because it's underwritten by sensory intuition and fixed subjective response to empirical stimuli. Just temperament has marginally higher correspondence than regular equal temperament or the fine retuning of the acoustic divisions but is impractical for modulation, complexity and richness.

Harmony is understood by the listener as inevitable or musical by means of roughness and its integral tension evoking desire for resolution into agreeableness. In this proponents of non-tonal systems claim acoustic consonance and dissonance need not evoke these responses as in tonality and that responses depend only on harmonic context howsoever designed. They hold the current responses are due to tonality continuing to be the culture's prevailing harmonic system with its popular and other musics, and just happening to have an equivalence with acoustics.

A subjective dissonance can be any sound at all, even a strong consonance in tonality, that is treated as roughness or a point of tension in terms of perhaps an infinity of legitimate different systems, once people are properly familiar with the system it belongs in as they are familiar with tonality now. It's argued that purely contextualized instability can be perceived as in need of resolution to any sound, even a strong dissonance in tonality, subjective experience being completely relative and in disregard for the reality of coincidence and non-coincidence of wave peaks.

However, experientially the listener's familiarity with non-tonal systems completely fails to overcome the natural evocation of incongruous sensations in them, the mind to no extent whatsoever being subject to reorientation to them and all sense made of their sound's inherent logic, or in terms of music, remains with reference to tonality. Moreover intervals have their own ineluctable tonality-referenced character, not of this world, in addition to just sounding different and seemingly being reusable in different contexts.

All music, whether art or folk, pop or other, derives whatever aesthetic content it has from its system's reference to or departure from, however broadly shaped, to the acoustic correspondence the ear immediately and necessarily seeks. Notes get their meaning from connotations of tonal keys they belong to via their natural overtone series- any other logic is unintelligible as internalization or assimilation on the intuitive level fails to take place. Folk and other non-art non-tonal musics have some legitimacy beyond their limited tonal reference however in their nature as more continuous with and part of rather than reflective of life, except that most present life and culture is flawed, reflected in the calculated rather than natural harmony: they are improvisatory and uncritical but their cultures, as also the case with tonal pop, need critique.

The Pythagorean, sensory theory of musical perception where acoustic facts issue given sensations only finds comparable systems in the minds of those for whom art means little and all music is received equally superficially, its aesthetic content unaccessed. The aesthetic return of the great works of the tonal repertory is of immeasurable enrichment, life changing and beyond almost all other experience, and whether tonality can be reduced to a relative position alongside other vacuous harmonies is not serious question but the province of unwitting NBs.

There's an innate disposition to situate any musical idea in the tonal framework and its justifying acoustic parallels regardless of surface enculturation: musical response is at its greatest in tonality, over other systems the listener may also have familiarity with. Tonality in its manifold applications is the only system that can ever have meaning for us because of its reference to reality, non-tonal music's abstracted harmony at most being grasped by the intellect, outside of the senses, intuition and art. Beethoven's tonal string quartets admit of deep meaning whereas Schoenberg's serial ones cannot, regardless of the brilliance of construction under their unlikely schemes and of how the listener looks to overcome their supposed conditioning.

Aesthetic experience is a connection between the objective world and its subjective understanding, and the intellectual abstractions of non-tonality are contained only within the subjective on the surface level of thought, connection with the world and hence meaning indeed pre-empted by deliberation and rational account. Music's aesthetic content with its acoustic parallels by contrast is immediate not mediated by the intellect, though requires around five listenings for the mind's internalization of the large quantities of information involved and temporally distributed- music is a secret in a similar way to the aesthetic itself and the Self, necessarily hidden behind the foregrounded intellect and propositions only for describing truth. With the visual arts by contrast a single exposure impresses their fullness on the mind and is sufficient for access.

Non-tonal music listenings yield limited return and if continue past five the mind begins merely to memorize the material's connections without finding deeper aesthetic logic to which they might have been written- there's no equivalent to the familiarity with tonal music, the lack of reference to given response meaning the sounds remain arbitrary and on the surface. It's the nature of music as Schoenberg even insisted for the listener just to listen rather than cerebrate, finding logic within the artwork that connects it isomorphically and ecstatically with subjective understanding: art is first order meaning not second-order calculation of arbitrarily formulated relations.

It's seemed to some thinkers there's a need to establish logically or even physiologically why acoustic dissonance should sound rough and consonance agreeable, and that this not having been done is grounds for hoping at some point they need not sound as such and hence justifies other harmonic systems. Lived experience is the basis of reality though and initial sensory intuition regardless of lack of corroboration isn't subject to recontextualization- ice is cold, the sky is blue, and C and C# are rough. The proof of the pudding is in the eating not the cook's elaborate arguments for the recipe, the senses being prior to cultural norms; the underlying logic making a tune tuneful isn't relative, and as with the aesthetic generally is experienced as absolute yet unjustifiable.

It's impossible in principle to argue conclusively for a harmonic system based on acoustic facts as there's no coherent epistemological justification for why anything in the outside material world need necessarily and consistently evoke response within subjective experience. Plato mistakenly asks the second-order question of what it is about simple frequency ratios that should give us the experience of agreeableness and why shouldn't more complex ratios come to give it, but first-order experience isn't subject to causal connection or intellectual discussion. Coincidence has unity and simplicity and these values need not be questioned; indeed increasing agreeableness equates with decreasing ratio-nality.

Our connectedness with the world and immediacy of experience has to be assumed, truth being unstatable and hidden because it's lived reality not a theory about reality, and hence our relation with the world is aesthetic and based on faith rather than calculable or understandable in terms of a foregrounding subject-object relation. The relative is only the absolute in relative form, Brahman inherent in all things to provide only subject-subject epistemological relations: the relative however can't be taken for the absolute as the absolute inheres immanently not perspicuously, and relations grounded only in relativity such as non-tonal harmonies always lack meaning.

We are situated in and part of the world not separate to it, art's enigmatic nature expressive of our intimacy with rationally indeterminate underlying life dynamics or gunas: non-tonal intellectual constructions conversely are on the level of abstracted theory not life or humanity. The notion of an outside world to connect with is a wrongheaded manifestation of the calculating left hand brain norms of Caucasian predisposition and its Apollonian civilization alienated from Dionysian immediacy: its NBs and their unreferenced thought are reflected democratically in unreferenced norms. Aesthetic experience however silences and stifles Plato's epistemological question and the intellect's groundless activity, with tonality embodying the unity of objective and subjective and reason and intuition at the heart of lived life.

We may stand critically back from and demonstrate everything except our own starting point or experiential bedrock- there's no second-order reasoning about first-order experience and a second-order harmony can at most be built in tonal terms, such as by Birtwistle or Colin Matthews where material in a moment to moment atonality moves around tacit tonal centres to provide an emergent supra-tonality. The difficulty with forms of atonality per se is that when tonal ambiguity is made fundamental and the last trace of diatonicism by which the listener orients themselves disappears, meaning is lost as it consists in that ultimate relation to a key as underwritten by empirical facts.

Indeed non-tonal musics' dry logic is disrupted by the appearance of tonal consonance since the ear instantly identifies it as a reference point, and hence with yet more contrivance and self-consciousness the composer must look to avoid it: acoustic consonance has balance of proportion, independence and definiteness whereas dissonance has dynamic tendency in parallel with the gunas, dependence and instability. Given responses negate non-tonal systems, their play of material lacking illumination of critical faculties on the intuitive level because of the divergent innate characteristics of any material and compromise to artistic unity.

Chromaticism can't operate autonomously and only enriches tonality: with a dissonance or note row as a point of reference and the notes finding order only in relationships between themselves, music as the inner life of tones undermines itself, leaving the emptiness of an abstract scheme even if it retains formal interest. Schoenberg attempted a liberation of music by democratizing notes' relationships but when all notes are of equal importance and without an acoustic centre transcending them to reality, they are trivialized rather than elevated: as in the nataraja, liberty is paradoxical containment within truth and we are already free.

Harmonic organization and argument is highly sophisticated and when not referenced to acoustics, as with the uncoordinated thinking mind not referenced to the Self, the music and thinking is incoherent and indeed foolish because one has lost sight of reality and oneself. Apprehension and justification of the intervallic relationships as the work progresses isn't explained by cultural convention that rationalizes the harmony to the listener through its integral setting in their wider environment since it's too complex and distantly related to the rest of praxis and its presuppositions. It is coincidence and unity that is euphonious and euphoric, and non-coincidence and disunity distracting and constricting, reflecting freedom issuing from within and inward reference to the world, not relationally from without and outer reference to an arbitrary system: the intuition and truth, not the intellect and contemplation, are self-contained.

Indeed the IB listener's critical appraisal of the aesthetic success of works and their interpretation in performance has such intricacy and richness it can only be grounded in an objectivity not checks against cultural norms no matter how subtle, and is largely eliminated when applied to works of non-tonal systems. Direct, intellectually unverifiable experience of movement away from and return to subjectively experienced acoustic consonance, the music constantly referring to immanently pre-existing background reality not arbitrary culture, accounts for aesthetic experience's depth and non-relativity. The argument or presentations in non-tonal works that by contrast clashes with acoustics is based on organizational principles and can't be followed whereas tonal presentations derive support not from principle but direct subjective contact with reality.

The roughness of acoustic dissonance isn't blunted by its greater use in atonality and the attempted convergence of atonality's conceptual unity with the mind's perceptual unity is incompletely carried through. Dissonance doesn't change its experienced character in different contexts and instead is just understood by the mind as appropriate for its position within tonal structures. These derive unique illumination from the natural response parallel and enable the listener to internalize, comprehend and experience them, while non-tonalilty's consideration of concord and discord as divergent from acoustics makes a similar internalization process an idle fantasy.

Only the disagreeable interpretation of the roughness disappears in context, such that there's no desire for the roughness to stop and be resolved at every instant- it must be resolved but is deferred for the purposes of the argument. Dissonance is the whole means by which tonal music and its arguments however shaped are constructed, and without the constant background reference to its counterpart consonance, as with thought's reference to the background Self, it is rough and disagreeable per se without reason or purpose, and indeed willful and mindless.

There is no emancipation of dissonance because dissonance per se isn't contextualized in the first place, its roughness being fixed and already perfectly well dealt with by the sophisticated tonal context. Tonality neutralizes disagreeableness by the dynamic tendency of roughness leading to consonance, whereas elsewhere it leads uncontrasted only to other dynamic tendency. The disagreeableness is sublimated by context into meaningful roughness, the right acoustically dissonant chords selected for their subjective response in the only system of aesthetic parallel with the improvable outside world: dissonance is rough because it's not consonant, not because we say it is, but hence it can't be proved.

Roughness is an intrinsically negative value from which we look to the positive and this is why it's resolved in tonality, rather than our exposure to it there making us look to it. Indeed if dissonance could be made to sound consonant, if there was any good reason for wanting to do this, there would then only be a system the same as the original- tonality is bedrock. Dissonant chords can never sound different because there's nothing for them to change to, comparable with the laws of physics or speed of light in Einstein's Relativity theory: there are no other laws to change to as they're just commonsensical cause and effect and if our relationship with them changes then the whole physical environment changes with us to keep them the same. Tonality is irrepressible and unapproachable all as no matter how fast you travel, the speed of light relative to you doesn't change.

There has to be something that doesn't change in order for change to ultimately be relative to and art's concern is with this realm of truth, similarly intangible like laws or light. Change in purely relativistic systems is superficial and affected as there can be no pure relativism and the absolute background or wider commonsensical harmony of objective cause and subjective effect is still there, leaving the ear mystified.

The fundamental dynamics or gunas of life and art can't be foregrounded in the modernist sense, being something to experience not raise to the surface of consciousness to look at objectively. Truth is hidden from view, being a reference point not an object, all as the eye or individual I can see everything but itself in subject-object intellectual terms. The Self however sees itself directly via its own self-referentiality and thus experiences life and art directly in its subject-subject relation with reality, the knower, process of knowing and the known all being the same. There's really no other-referential, theoretical or subject-object experience of reality, and likewise tonality always reasserts itself with its acoustic-subjective logic theoretically hidden.

Dissonance's characteristic roughness means it quickly sounds cliched and trite, and not tonality with its intelligible meaning within consonant containment. Despite atonality's use of selected intervallic sequences over others within its wider homogeneity the chords all stubbornly sound similar in complete disregard for the stacked up theorizing around them and its opposition to art's direct and intimate connection with us. Likewise the stock of recognizable gestures that emerge from non-tonal styles immediately become phoney because no good reason for them can be sensed.

Nonetheless for serial composers' diligence in looking for variety of expression their results have a high degree of uniformity with the ear only making sense of a limited, tonal-inflected range of relations: the claim is for radical development but in fact all post-Second Viennese School atonality sounds plagiarized from it and fake. A work like Boulez' Le marteau sans maitre that tries to take serialism forward is the same routine sound world and idiom smudged over with light French colours of the period, while Riegger who hardly knew of the Second Viennese School still sounds very like it: the music's bad faith from being thought not felt is revealed once the system is repeated. Similarly pre-tonal modal polyphony and its equality of voices is a uniform homogeneous and disturbing mass like no other period.

The tonic triad by contrast never sounds predictable or out of date as it isn't a musical device in a relativistic system subject to inauthenticity but has infinite fertility and interest because of its transcendent, unverifiable reference to acoustics; the minor triad has dissonance but as a variant of the major derives its meaning from reference to it. Wider cultural contextual factors may affect our interpretation of the world, providing presuppositions for the rationalization of response to stimuli but aren't relevant to their basic and necessarily immediate experience: the direct aesthetic connection is the initial realm for such relativity to revolve around and nothing further about it is appropriate to be said. The Apollonian mind and the Dionysiac reality are expressed in epistemology lying at the heart of philosophy, at the heart of Western thought, and tonality lying at the heart of music, at the heart of art.

This means the aesthetic or the access to pre-rational life dynamics inhering within experience and common humanity can be had by people of any culture: art is universal and timeless not a modernist cognitive matter expressive of mediating presuppositions and norms. And tonality then provides for the experiential foundations that ground artistic achievements, avoiding them being relativized and dismissed: the Bach suites, Mozart concertos, Beethoven sonatas and Wagner operas have depth meaning not contingency and are unthinkable in non-tonal idioms under supposed other cultural backgrounds.

Despite post-tonality being pursued for over a hundred years, as pre-tonality had been for well over a thousand, acoustic consonance sounds not in the slightest less agreeable nor dissonance less rough, and these harmonies no less unintelligible. Schoenberg suggested his grandchildren would be able to tell wrong notes in a serial work easier than him but notwithstanding a continuing cultural counter effect of tonality the dissociation of physics with qualia and the idea of serial musicality beyond latent tonal relations remains quixotic. Moreover atonality had first been seen only as advanced polytonality with the key changing with every note rather than a new harmony of radically relativized perceptions; Schoenberg also remained uncertain about what he'd done and spoke of both the instinctual life of tones in tonality and the huge error of modality.

Musical meaning isn't reducible to a transfer of arbitrary syntactical relationships into the psychological domain and the strangeness of non-tonal systems fails to become second nature. It's thinkers arguing for cultural relativism within cultures with relativistic norms that are culture-based, not aesthetic experience: orders imposed on sound against nature cannot be heard when the sound is heard as music, the ear instead automatically seeking key in the smallest musical phrase: to hear tones as music is to situate them in tonal constructions of some kind.

The finest work of the new music doesn't compare with a Brahms concerto or Strauss tone poem nor the finest mass of the entire Renaissance with a Schumann or Mahler symphony. Carter and Desprez and all potentially great musical minds of post- and pre- tonal periods operate within structures that hamper aesthetic insight and expression and pale against tonality's resources, art's most powerful force.

Late romantic chromaticism and its complexities of key reference enriches tonality but in the next step it becomes self-serving, rationally referencing instead its own notes and corrupting music through their equal possibility of belonging to all keys. Stylistically the Second Viennese School is still romantic and emotional but rather than a means of accessing subtle rightfulness in pre-rational dynamics it has a cold and dead heart that becomes progressively more exposed in later serialism, and characterizes all post-tonality: indeed as signalling the death of music and culture its character is appropriately ghostly.

Music distils fundamental meaning as aesthetic indemonstrable intuition and faith, in both sound's subjective plus objective reference and the movement or inner life of tones of the acoustic dynamic tendencies involved, directly expressive of the gunas. This rather than demonstrable reason connects us profoundly with the world: instead of unbridgeable dualistic subject-object epistemological gaps between us and the world, both have the same underlying dynamics of the gunas, contained in the same consciousness, Self, absolute or Brahman. Consciousness monistically includes what it's conscious of, all as modern physics' overarching theory of quantum mechanics and its involvement of subjectivity implies; Brahman also being an unstatable undifferentiated plane yet issuing the gunas, compares with the indeterminate properties of fundamental particles yet issuing their fields of potential, in both cases depending on what we do.

It's not possible to bridge the ontological difference between sound of frequencies related by ratios of smaller or larger numbers and the experience of agreeableness or roughness because intellectually grounded certain empirical knowledge, or a theoretical connection between mind and reality, is impossible. Descartes invented epistemology and the search for certainty in the early modern period by postulating distinct dual realms of inner awareness and outer world separated by cognitive faculties, but which are unreconnectable because incommensurable. Consciousness and its contents however have the same base and knower, knowing and known are already united: as Descartes intimated, truth is indeed found only within itself unreliant on prior premises, but can't then be raised to the propositional level with such as 'I think, I am', which only indicates the culture's normalization of Apollonian rationality and its false dichotomies.

The link between inner and outer has to be assumed on a transcendent and aesthetic basis in a subject-subject relation with reality: a search for grounds to primary sense data issues from a state of mind, culture and civilization entirely on the wrong footing. Knowledge can be divided into intellectual, ethical and aesthetic and the error of Apollonian thought is taking the intellect in abstraction and trying to explain not only the others but itself with it, looking for grounds in thought rather than that which thinks.

The connection with the outside world can't be demonstrated not because arguments aren't complicated or good enough but because there is no outside world: the rope that looks like a snake in twilight isn't a harmless snake but not a snake, and likewise problems aren't solved on the level of problems but by transcending them. There is no epistemology, no snake, no problem and no non-tonal harmony- these concerns can't be dealt with by means of the rationality that creates them in the first place or they lead on ad infinitum: common sense or the sun must dawn again to see the rope and we come back to ourselves, the attention returning to itself instead of off doing its own thing, building useless theoretical castles in the sky and chromaticism for its own sake. No argued path back to a connection with the world or truth can be found, all as no path to oneself can be found because we already are ourselves and foolishness is an internal matter to sort out.

There's no support for non-tonality from the lack of subject-object verification for tonality because the epistemological search and its verificational regressions gives way not to relativism but common sense: when phenomenological epistemologists progressively bracketed off theory of all kinds to attend to experience per se they were brought literally to their senses and the whole tradition collapsed. Life and experience have no justification beyond themselves, as indeed the increasingly greater difficulties of intellectual inquiry into the other areas of knowledge of ethics and aesthetics make clear.

The immediacy and naturalness of the phenomenological approach sublimated into an unquestioned and intellectually silent return to real life and its intuitive certainties. The intellect at most later accounts for or parallels the mind's basic intuitive operation and doesn't pass beyond it to provide any meaningful Platonic trans-world realm of reasoning: the causal laws of physics don't merely arise from observations of repeating outcomes that can't be epistemologically grounded, but are necessary because of our immanent, guaranteeing relation with the observed world.

Truth is hidden but accessible via aesthetics in that the world exists because it's there not because of a reason, the attention turning back on itself to find structure only within itself: its pre-rational dynamics are also those of life, uniting subject and object. The relativist alternative to both epistemology and common sense is arbitrary cultures of norms and praxis but though these are presuppositional they're subject to being foregrounded into propositions whose relations as usual can be calculated but not grounded.

The experience of the ratios of notes' frequencies is grounded in incalculable and inscrutable immediacy, all as with regular unselfconscious life without the intellect's complicated involvement. Post-tonality makes the mistake of trying to derive experience from rational reflection rather than vice versa and hence defies art: experience is fundamental not relative to something else within a theory or amenable to the ratios between ideas, all as the experience of the ratios between the notes is not amenable to ideas.

Intellectual explanations about experience give way to self-justifying, for-itself and self-structuring experience itself: a desk is in front of us for no more than that it's seen to be there, and acoustic dissonance is rough for no more than that it's heard to be so. Relating the experience of sound to physical features either of the waves, such as the phenomenon of audible beats in infrequent coincidence or of the ear, such as characteristics of its basilar membrane is further wrongheaded rational gap-bridging which assumes the ontological mind-matter distinction and only defers the problem of cause, in that the question is then what is it about beats or membrane characteristics that causes the experience. Coinciding sound waves sound agreeable just because they coincide, not because we're used to them and Plato is wrong to think this begs the question.

The doubt over epistemology's validity developed during the first decades of atonality and serialism and the parallel doubt in its radical relativization of notes: in both the search for meaning within conceptual relations was failing catastrophically- meaning and truth is there but apprehended by intellectually oblique means. The rise of intellectuality and demise of art in the 20th century reflects the rise of NBs and their insensitivity in society via democratization and postmodernism; instead of them being situated in a hierarchy of social meaning as with notes in tonality, their equal treatment has brought a normative denial of aesthetic hierarchy and nihilism in life. Life is also undermined in dualistic binary digital simulation in place of direct unitary contact with reality, expressive of NBs' relative mental relations.

The process of understanding is aesthetic in consisting in the faith-based reference of the relative intellect to the intuition or hidden noumenal reality, truth given via consciousness's core non-calculable component rather than only relationally or ratio-nally in terms of other aspects of the intellect. Western Apollonian culture's non-reality and relativism has ascended over Dionysian reality through the controlling democratic masses' lower consciousness the intellect can refer to.

The democratic rise of NBs over IBs was further expressed in the competing serialist and tonal Debussy-Stravinsky-neoclassicist trends of the first half of the century, the post-tonalists gaining ultimate ascendance in parallel with postmodernism well before the end of the century. Serialism per se no longer occupies the same dominant position but its absurd pyrrhic victory provides the biggest emperor's new clothes party in the history of art, leaving art music in ruins and no great composers writing today, a situation not seen at least since the developments in counterpoint around 1200.

Tonality embodies the subject-subject relation in the reduction of objective to subjective sound experience, in the freedom and rightfulness of its circumscribed terms within the nataraja's circle of fire beyond, and in tonal meaning as privately but intersubjectively not ostensively experienced. Within the subject-subject relation the gunas and human emotion arise as immanent, intellectually indeterminate structure, providing tonal works with insatiable fascination in contrast to the subject-object structure of intellectual complexity's tedium. Modernism lost the insight gained at the end of the modal period that variety is paradoxically contained within two scales not seven or more, nor an infinity of tone rows, and that meaning is coextensive with unsuperfluousness.

Detached symbolic logic, abstracted dialectics and syntax without immanent semantics lead into oblivion whereas the relative mind's reference to the absolute to trace aesthetic lines or gunas within experience translates the empty truth of analytic tautology into empirical common sense and consonance sounding right because it sounds right. Modernity questions the transcendent, God, spirit and aesthetic and Dionysian experience, making everything meaningless: if there are new things to say in music they are within tonality not beyond it, music not being extendable by trying to change its fundamentals. Life however is the only really unlimited thing, not a retiring artistic reflection of its underlying dynamics, however great music may be.

[Sean]

Pt.2-

The 2212221 semitone harmonic progression arising out of Pythagorean investigations of vibrating strings, overtones and acoustic relations has had virtually exclusive use in structuring art music from the Hellenic to 20th century atonalilty, though until the late 16th century it usually didn't begin with that 2 to give the major scale nor with the 2 two notes before for the basic minor scale, 2122122. Of the seven main modes as beginning on the basic divisions of the octave or piano's white notes, unfortunately only those that were missed on C and A provide for full recognition and organization of acoustic consonance and dissonance and subjectively experienced musical unity.

Between C and A or Ionian and Aeolian is B or Locrian whose opening triad has two semitone intervals, not providing a consonant perfect fifth and thus unsuitable, and until Glarean's 1547 theoretical Dodecachordon modes were limited to D to G, the four most distant from B, with the exception of the Greeks' use of all seven around the second century CE. To provide for modes on the other notes, around 600 Pope Gregory 1st introduced plagal or transposed forms of the D-G modes beginning on their dominant with F# accidentals, though retaining the original mode's final note for cadences, and hence in place of the C and A modes' natural progressions were substituted the 2221221 of F or Lydian and 2122212 of D or Dorian.

Tonality transposes its major and minor scales to the twelve chromatic notes for 24 keys, using accidentals provided for by the black notes dividing up the 2s: the two modal applications of the four or seven scales from 12 notes become 12 tonal applications of two scales. The harmonic containment within two scales of extraordinary properties, reflecting relative duality transcended into unity, also develops a counterpart contrapuntal technique in the 17th century with one melodic line prioritized over others.

This gives the means for expressing the major scale's linear movement away from and return to acoustic consonance as leading up to and away from the dominant note with features like the appoggiaturan leading notes positioned centrally and before the tonic: music's linearity or temporal succession of material is now grounded by the holism of its immanent acoustic correspondence at all points.

Also these tonal developments early in the modern period are responses to their cultures' inauthenticity increasingly outwardly expressed, with Dionysian experience, commonality and spirituality declining: the underlying dynamics of life giving it meaning are shifted onto art in progressively alienated and democratized, relativist society. Moreover the modes' false variety and aimless polyphony as prefiguring democracy are paralleled in serialism's endless series and layered construction. Polyphonic homogeneity however arose from adding lines to plainchant with notation from the ninth century, such complexity no longer being forestalled by the need to remember it; homogeneity may also reflect factors like God's similar presence and background stasis in an endless variety of worldly phenomenon, expressed in similar and static but endlessly varied material.

The Pythagoreans almost got it right from the inception of Western music and tonality has evolved minimally over two and a half millennia. A core reason it took until the late Renaissance however to be perfected and its final form to gradually overwhelm music is that most of the prior music was within the monophonic plainchant backcloth, whose lack of chords minimized recognition of the dissonant point of reference and thus any search for improved organization of consonance and dissonance.

Renaissance polyphony experimented in numerous directions such that some later periods and trends employ more medieval techniques than earlier ones and figures at its close like Palestrina and Lassus have techniques so integrated they are further from tonal hierarchy and counterpoint than the earliest figures like Ockeghem and Busnois. Once tonality emerged however composers realized what they'd been looking for and how to develop it and the polyphonic tradition broke down with an abruptness seen nowhere else in music history.

Much more existed to explore within the keys of the two tonal modes than even between entirely different non-tonal modes, regardless of their apparent interest on paper- they have an open-air quality yet which provides little sense of variety or further freedom. The possible pairs Lydian and Dorian or Mixolydian on G and Phrygian on E, both like Ionian and Aeolian a minor third apart with major and minor opening triads, were also never rivals for transposing scales onto other notes for contained systems of complexity.

Although tonality is natural the process of its working out, as with much of natural science, isn't simple and it hasn't arisen elsewhere- the insights of the Greeks were scarcely matched for thousands of years and Western culture has made scientific advances no other has. The pentatonic scale for instance is widespread beyond the West and may date to the third millennium BCE but produces a simpler system indeed usually without counterpoint, and can also be seen as a proto-tonality as it consists in the major scale without the fourth and seventh notes.

The Indian musical tradition though had introduced at least by the late second millennium BCE a seven note scale and octave, a process of adding notes that can provide circles of 4ths or 5ths, and the tetrachord or tone-tone-semitone progression. The octave's seven note division however may have relation with the seven celestial objects visible to the naked eye that move against the stars, excluding faint Uranus which the ancients missed, also providing features like the seven day week, but if anything it aligns with the naturalness of the system, tonality truly the music of the spheres.

The trend pursuing tonal exploration beyond the romantic gradually fell during the century to the serial and post-tonal trend: despite increasing chromaticism being only one of several lines of development in the late romantic its harmonic significance caused the curtailment of the period's immense achievements, at the heart of the repertory. The period's historical height of tonal technique and sophistication inspired some of the greatest of minds but was lost to the intellectualized pursuit and study of the technique, increasingly divorced from the music and spirit it served: development in the arts may provide new realms of expression but these are grounded in non-relative foundations.

Chromaticism serves tonality not itself, still deriving meaning from mental key placement and hence providing the aesthetic experience of subjectivity connecting with objectivity. This is all as the intellect, regardless of how complex its processes, serves the intuition not itself and references it for it to have meaning: without reference to transcendent epistemology or the Self, notes and thought are insensible. With modernism and the concern for supposedly relationally clarifiable artistic processes tonality becomes redundant, but the intellect following not leading the intuition is its nature, with art being expressive of genuinely hidden truth and not a matter of expressing cognitive deception- the intellect at most matches the gunas' logic in later and infinitely regressive explanations. Tonality is aesthetic because it's for-itself and Dionysian, not for-other and Apollonian- tonality with its direct connection with reality, not chromaticism and its own relations, is for its own sake: art encapsulates thought and action based on vertical access to the absolute and immanent imperatives, contrasting with purely and confusedly horizontal relativity and means to ends or fruitive imperatives.

Among the important tonal late romantic lines of development was Debussian and Scriabinian colouristic or non-functional harmony and subsequently Messiaen's chordal writing for its own sake, exploiting inner rather than architectonic relations and showing what extraordinary logic could be found beyond the imposed formal schemes that had dominated music since 14th century ars nova. These subtle, in the moment, self-justifying relations of the gunas indeed illuminate the real logic in architectonics.

In the new climate however the tonal trend opposed to serialism and Germanic rationality found difficulty uncovering further terms of expression and developed neoclassicism in a reversion to pre-romantic and less elaborately conceived or richly scored forms, but which were necessarily limited in scope despite new techniques applied. The succeeding trend of minimalism and the new simplicity continues addressing unexplored tonal possibilities, although music not being life and consisting only in a certain defined medium and terms of reference to work with, in three or four centuries tonality's broad scope has been thoroughly surveyed and music may have little more to say.

Tonality's true course of evolution particularly beyond outwardly architectural purposes was also attacked from conservative as well as radical forces- the Soviets stalled their finest composers with requirements for simplistic political communication, resulting in one of the worst musical scandals of all time with the suppression of Shostakovich's Fourth symphony of 1936, not performed orchestrally until 1961. Among the greatest of symphonies, dissolving sonata form into the ecstatic moment it's the key example of both tonality's and Shostakovich's path not taken.

The Fourth is his only mature or semi-mature work in his real voice and showed the untapped resources of tonality still available to a mind of such insight and lucidity, negating the too easily acquired intellectual virtues of other harmonies as much as the political posturing and fear, similarly issuing from lack of wisdom. The last of his flashbacks to the Fourth is the end of the final Fifteenth symphony of 1972, a terrible reminiscence of the scherzo in music's twilight.

The symphonic tradition also flourished to the west of the continental thinkers, in the English musical renaissance and Bax its greatest of all composers similarly finding vast expressive resource in post-romanticism through non-functional for-itself harmony and juxtaposition. The immanent supra-tonal structures of these composers along with examples in Stravinsky, Strauss, Alfven, Feldman, Messiaen, and the new simplicity, and previously in Bach, Scarlatti, Schumann, Wagner and even Webern, have all been misunderstood in terms of the for-other Apollonian culture. Notably the pragmatic, theoretically sceptical English also led the way in the Renaissance toward tonality with Fayrfax, Tallis and others.

Music's century-long dissolution from the advent of atonality results in a drivellous output from most composers that only compares with school children who rebel but rather than walking off hang around the classroom door, unsure where to go. Neither tonal nor atonal their feckless postmodern cynicism is aware that beyond chromaticism lies nothing: music has shuffled half-way back from the empty excesses of serialism and stopped.

Few have Glass's sensitivity to see that 'these creeps and crazies were trying to make us write this creepy crazy music' and that from the mindless issues mindlessness- indeed few with much sensitivity, whether composers or performers, are drawn to music in its present condition. Glass shows what infinity of meaning, opulence and fascination melodic containment within tonality has, demolishing in a few artistic bars all the barbarity and artifice that passed for music in the 20th century. Further the new post-tonal mush music has the same experiential similarity across works as modal and serial music, lacking the character tonality imbues its genres with.

The normative background of critical faculties' enhancement implicit in art as material plays within form and one genre evolves into another becomes nihilism in postmodernism and its music due to the rise of NB minds over IB insight that gave the criticism purpose and grounds. Normative consideration for aesthetic meaning generally has disappeared, mass culture is now official culture and the tonal repertory is dragged down to NBs' level of pop. Valuable postmodern critique unfortunately goes on to trash truth and with art as reflective of life, art's demise suggests there is nothing of transcendent basis left to reflect and thus highlight what is only of relational basis, and that the West is culturally bankrupt and precipitous.

Meaning isn't the closed analytic reason of foregrounded interconnections but the aesthetic perception of interconnections' reference to the real world, closed instead away from the groundless intellect within the nataraja. Instead of the hidden unverifiable subject-object or experience-acoustic logic in triadic consonance serialism moved further towards an omnipresence of featureless material within likewise flat structures, trying hopelessly to couch the distinctionlessness of the absolute or Brahman in intellectual terms, or the knower or subject in known or object terms, when there are only subject terms: indeed serialism always really means total serialism and total rationality, anything else admitting that its ludicrous numerical view of meaning is wrong. Just as linearity or relationality without reference to the whole or absolute beyond is meaningless, serial homogeneity and holistic argumentation devoid of linear goal directedness or some level of preparation, modulation and resolution of material as based on its inner relations or gunas, is meaningless: though the absolute is self-contained it also infuses the relative.

Modernism assumes that all artworks' constituents are clouded over by cultural or historical influence which needs shedding through a process of pointillistic isolation from each other, leading to better reflection of the artist's relationship with their society and their work having greater authenticity. However the distinction of aesthetic from conceptual apprehension shows artworks instead have absolute reference- art's material per se has immanent logic not amenable to cultural situatedness or rationalization for objective justification.

Not only in fact is the very application of rationality culturally situated but tonality has not been shown to be a cultural phenomena. Truth is not accessible from without via pre-compositional processes in the realm of subject-object rationality and conscious thought, but from the dynamics of working with the material itself through more intuitive processes within the subject-subject relation that understands the compositional dynamics and insight to be same as the sentient dynamics and insight in acoustics and in life.

Tonality derives meaning from its given background acoustic relations whereas atonality has only its own internal relations, relativity without absolute reference and man-made construction of bogus complexity and farcical portentousness. The tonal hierarchy and some notes deemed more important than reflects not arbitrary capitalist privilege of some groups over others but a foundation for truth where instead a hierarchical society elevates the most insightful members, not the destructive democratic horde. Plato's Republic comes close as perhaps did the caste system when initially based on merit: people need to derive meaning from the transcendent values above them regardless of their understanding of those values.

Capitalism's problems aren't translatable to the ruling class as tonic and dominant, bourgeoisie as the median and other notes of intermediate concord, and masses as the most discordant notes or nonharmonics entirely outside the scale: tonality instead indicates a hierarchical social system based on levels of meaning and their levels of possible receptivity by IBs and NBs. Western democracy without recognizing value beyond confuses what is its pointillistic alienation with liberty, whereas both socialism and serialism, with their revolutionary natures for overthrowing the old systems and bringing classlessness and egalitarianism, have become discreditable in tandem.

Musical and political democracy fail as meaning consists in stratification not homogeneity, equal meaning being no meaning. Tensions in art and life may be resolved though transformation but serialism, democracy and socialism are really whitewashing principle-based systems and subject to further critique: real critique however isn't a function of endless relative cognitive dialectics at all, subtle though they may be, but a direct epistemological access to reality and gunas beneath the surface.

It's not tonality or social hierarchy that hides or justifies flaws and tensions but a system that denies that art and life have structure, and even serialism advocates criticize its overbearing formalism. Art and particularly music guides the mind through its inner life of dynamics and potentials, and not merely reflects outer culture: truth is pre-relationally and silently justified by itself within itself for itself not by relations between the mind's or culture's ideas and praxis, regardless of how uniform they're made. With all elements as equal and without preference, non-tonality reaches its true form and true inhumanity with total serialism and intellectually united but isolated events without aesthetically perceivable effect on or connection with each other, running on mechanical schemes devoid of inner logic- alienation is complete.

Rational relations per se parallel the attention having lost sight of the Self to produce the suspension of mind and inability to act, for instance experienced by Arjuna in The Bhagavad Gita or in subject-subject courtship failure, the gunas indeed at the heart of life, and in computers' unconsciousness and lack of experience of meaning from their operation under formal symbol manipulation without further grounding- as shown by the Chinese room argument. Brahman is unitary and homogeneous but meaning and everything else above it in the relative has structure, issuing from and referenced to Brahman: structure needs linearity on the relative level plus holism on the transcendent, not holism on the relative and no transcendent; indeed the gunas, as the first thing issuing from Brahman, are aesthetic lines of potential.

Serialism eliminates simplistic architectonics and teleology but stasis needs putting to developmental use based on the inner characteristics of material: the right option for the material's movement and transformation is present within it in alignment with the gunas, not in arbitrary abstruse schemes without. Total serialism's meaninglessness uniformity, surface depthlessness and play as issuing from relativity announce postmodernism, with its counterpart minimalism by contrast finding aesthetic logic inside material, where attention is isolated by singular material instead of diffused by diverse and only abstractly isolated material.

Music losing itself once its development is taken to its logical extreme reflects democracy losing itself once taken to its logical extreme of rule by mindless mass, with the loss of hierarchy of value and meaning and technology in place of IB direct lived aesthetic experience. Art as reflective of life passes away as life does, tonality arising from the 17th to 20th centuries in response to alienation arising from increasing material Apollonian life and loss of community, spirituality and Dionysian experience on the cultural level: tonality's resources peak in the late 19th century, music leading up to and away from the colossal achievements of Wagner.

When the last trace of diatonicism and given meaning, or truth in society, is consumed by relativity and democracy, music and culture evaporate: music to sustain itself needs acoustical relations transcending its notes and society to sustain itself needs meaning transcending its members. The 20th century's unprecedented stylistic diversity is no indication of an ongoing intellectual realm into which music can develop but a desperate seeking out of side avenues away from tonality, all of which are cul-de-sacs. Indeterminacy, electro-acoustics, microtonality, folk music devices and the rest are no true alternatives but just a few remaining possibilities to swat down. The problem is the system of art and high culture reflective of Dionysian life as obliquely situated in repressive Apollonian culture, instead of folk culture in harmony, by means of a meritocratic hierarchy, with all other levels of a Dionysian culture that negates art.

In works from the late romantic such as Gotterdammerung and The Rite of spring and their endings in fire and death, the chromaticism is seen to destroy the fabric of music but lead on to real life and away from alienated life plus balancing art- and not on to an intellectualization of chromaticism and fake art. Art is invaluable in expanding the mind and reflecting life's fundamental dynamics and logic but only because of compromised real life- despite its greatness even Wagner said if only we had life we wouldn't need art. Art is only for life not a substitute for it, all as notes are for the truth in tonality not a substitute for it: it's not that tonality is a peremptory or arbitrary system that music needs liberating from but that ultimately music is a peremptory and arbitrary system and we need to get a life.

[Florestan]

we I need to get a life.

Fixed.

[karlhenning]

Sean, do you really expect anyone to read through all that?

[DavidW]

Sean, do you really expect anyone to read through all that?

Well at least he wrote it himself, unlike our resident Mendelssohn fanatic.   I know it's not saying much, but there you have it.   Sean is trying to break my page down key.

[karlhenning]

Oh, Sean generated all that himself;  I should never take that away from him.

[Sergeant Rock]

Since I've reached my sixth decade of life, I fear I don't have enough time left to read Sean's two part post. Would someone please summarize it in 25 words or less? Thank you.

Sarge

[Florestan]

Would someone please summarize it in 25 words or less?

I did it above. He needs a life, everything else is redundant.

[Sean]

Sean, do you really expect anyone to read through all that?

No, I guess posting it was a bit crazy.

[Gurn Blanston]

No, I guess posting it was a bit crazy.

An "Executive Summary" would be the way to go. It isn't any lack of interest that keeps me from reading it, it is the realization that life is too short....

[karlhenning]

Writing it was perhaps crazy; posting it only followed on from there ; )

[Archaic Torso of Apollo]

Since I've reached my sixth decade of life, I fear I don't have enough time left to read Sean's two part post. Would someone please summarize it in 25 words or less? Thank you.

I will try, Sarge:

Sean's tonality ideas are (like most of Sean's ideas, actually) nuts. (11 words)

Sample:

The finest work of the new music doesn't compare with a Brahms concerto or Strauss tone poem nor the finest mass of the entire Renaissance with a Schumann or Mahler symphony. Carter and Desprez and all potentially great musical minds of post- and pre- tonal periods operate within structures that hamper aesthetic insight and expression and pale against tonality's resources, art's most powerful force.

[bhodges]

I will try, Sarge:

Sean's tonality ideas are (like most of Sean's ideas, actually) nuts. (11 words)

Sample:

The finest work of the new music doesn't compare with a Brahms concerto or Strauss tone poem nor the finest mass of the entire Renaissance with a Schumann or Mahler symphony. Carter and Desprez and all potentially great musical minds of post- and pre- tonal periods operate within structures that hamper aesthetic insight and expression and pale against tonality's resources, art's most powerful force.

Totally agree.  This idea has been trotted out numerous times, and feels just as arid as it did when it first appeared.   

--Bruce

[Scarpia]

I picked one paragraph to read and found that Sean has invented a new word, "drivellous."

Music's century-long dissolution from the advent of atonality results in a drivellous output from most composers that only compares with school children who rebel but rather than walking off hang around the classroom door, unsure where to go.

The irony is remarkable.

[karlhenning]

In that citation, poor thinking and poor writing go hand in hand.

[Josquin des Prez]

http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Tl;dr

[Sean]

I will try, Sarge:

Sean's tonality ideas are (like most of Sean's ideas, actually) nuts. (11 words)

Sample:

The finest work of the new music doesn't compare with a Brahms concerto or Strauss tone poem nor the finest mass of the entire Renaissance with a Schumann or Mahler symphony. Carter and Desprez and all potentially great musical minds of post- and pre- tonal periods operate within structures that hamper aesthetic insight and expression and pale against tonality's resources, art's most powerful force.

This is a good summary, including the first part- being nuts is relative, of course, and I'm delighted with it.

[karlhenning]

Part of the trouble, Sean, is that you have no idea of what a muddle stuff like tonality's resources, art's most powerful force is.

[DavidW]

And here I thought that the most powerful force in art is a rich patron's pocketbook!

[Archaic Torso of Apollo]

This is a good summary, including the first part- being nuts is relative, of course, and I'm delighted with it.

Glad to see we're on the same page