On May 26, 2007, at 6:09 PM, Dean M. Estabrook wrote:
I appreciate these words .... thank you. From the sense I make of
it, "atonal" and "no-tonal" come to mean pretty much the same
thing, i.e., lack of a tonal center due to the avoidance of leading
tone progressions and harmonies built of fourths and fifths, which
tend to announce a tonal center given their relation to the
harmonic series.
Well, closer to the point is what definition of "tonal" are you going
to use, then?
Tonal vs. Modal
Tonal vs. Atonal
Tonal vs. Music I don't like (I had to throw that one in, as it WAS
the one my grandma used!)
I don't really like any of those terms, except in conjunction with
the historical context that created them. Even a relatively neutral
term (without the charge that comes with the "atonal" word) like
"modal" can start arguments, like the one Andrew Stiller and I had a
year or so ago on this list, when I realised that I was using a jazz
musician's definition of "modal" while Andrew was using a mideval/
renaissance definition. I think we both realised that we were talking
about different things that used the same word, and settled before
fisticuffs broke out...
On a similar subject, I attended an ear-opening master class with
pianist Ritchie Beirach and saxophonist Dave Liebman. They mentioned
that they hated the term "free jazz" because it didn't mean anything
to them, and it just tended to turn off listeners that had bad
associations with the term (like some have with the term "atonal"!)
Over the twenty-odd years they they had played together they had
developed a whole vocabulary to put into words the various concepts
they attached to what they were playing (like that old chestnut about
Inuit having many different words for "snow").
They talked about all the things that jazz could be without that were
tied to traditional playing, like keep the phrases, but get rid of
the chord progression (like So What). Then get rid of the chord
altogether, but keep the bass note (pedal). Then get rid of phrases,
but keep bars (to keep a metre.) Then keep the pulse, but get rid of
bars (so no metre.) Then maybe have different pulses between
different musicians, but with a clear relationship. Then NOT a clear
relationship. And that was only how they talked about the time!
Harmony, melody, etc., got even more intense. I learned a new term
for a kind of a medium ballad tempo feel, that they called a
"Slowlope", that was somewhat uncommon in modern jazz playing, except
for them. Anyway, all this was to illustrate that nobody else needed
to know or agree with the words they used for these things, as long
as THEY understood them. I think "tonal" and "atonal" are a couple
more of those words, that have taken on more and different meanings
than they originally had, and so are less useful now because of it.
Christopher
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