Felix Wörner Book order

Tonality Since 1950 documents the debate surrounding one of the most basic technical and artistic resources of music in the later 20th century. The flourishing of tonality – a return to key, pitch center, and consonance – in recent decades has undermined received views of its disintegration or collapse ca. 1910, intensifying the discussion of music's acoustical-theoretical bases, and of its broader cultural and metaphysical meanings. While historians of 20th-century music have often marginalized tonal practices, the present volume offers a new emphasis on emergent historical continuities. Musicians as diverse as Hindemith, the Beatles, Reich, and Saariaho have approached tonality from many different angles: as a figure of nostalgic longing, or as a universal law; as a quoted artefact of music's sedimented stylistic past, or as a timeless harmonic resource. Essays by 15 leading researchers cover a wide repertoire of concert and pop/rock music composed in Europe and America over the past half-century.

Tonality – or the feeling of key in music – achieved crisp theoretical definition in the early 20th century, even as the musical avant-garde pronounced it obsolete. The notion of a general collapse or loss of tonality, ca. 1910, remains influential within music historiography, and yet the textbook narrative sits uneasily with a continued flourishing of tonal music throughout the past century. Tonality, from an early 21st-century perspective, never did fade from cultural attention; but it remains a prismatic formation, defined as much by ideological-cultural valences as by its role in technical understandings of musical practice. Tonality 1900–1950: Concept and Practice brings together new essays by 15 leading American and European scholars.