shirling & neueweise wrote:
There just seems to be an inborn need to hear a tonic chord sounded
after a dominant.
and saying such a phrase really indicates more about the boundaries of
the musical education of the person saying it -- with what period it
begins and ends -- than about music and musical perception. for
example, did victoria have this "inborn need"? what about the gregorian
monks?
the "need" only arises once the identity / role of each chord and
protocols of the day are (made) clear to a listener, which is only
possible when there is a cultural reference and context surrounding the
chords. and this particular progression is only relevant -- and
varyingly -- to the predominant models over an approximately 200-year
period in western european "studied" music.
i think the original phrase could be reworded: i seem to prefer to hear
a tonic chord sounding after a dominant largely because of my own
personal musical education and background and the various musical
interests i have developed over the years.
It's the age-old nature-vs-nurture argument which is impossible of
resolution since we can't ever know for sure. Perhaps those cultures
which don't use the dominant-to-tonic harmonic motion simply haven't
discovered it yet. Certainly people who come from cultures which lack
that relationship respond favorably to music which has it as a strong
central characteristic.
It sure seems that people from cultures which have not had that relation
in their music have swarmed to Western music (I'm thinking of the
Japanese and the Chinese and the Indian cultures). While it's easy to
understand that the planet's fascination with pop/rock music is fed by
the pop-music industry, the great adoption and learning of Western
classical music is less easy to explain. And that attraction to Western
classical music happened long before the pop-music industry grew to its
current collossal size and power.
With potential incomes from Western classical music, on average, not
very high, it can't be purely economic reasoning which drives people who
grew up in these cultures to push their children into fervid study of
violin and piano.
What drove Chairman Mao (or whichever of his advisors was behind it) to
push the Cultural Revolution with such an iron fist, if not the fact
that he realized that his people were responding so strongly to Western
music, especially Western classical music?
I'm not coming down strong on either side of this argument, I just think
it's not as clear cut as either side is claiming. There's something
about Western classical music, with its predominating dominant-to-tonic
harmonic resolution which speaks to people who have a many-centuried
(millenial) native musical culture of their own which lacks that
dominant-to-tonic relationship.
I think it may be a bit more "natural" than many would accept, and I
also agree that when one's culture is hammered with such a thing for so
long, it's hard to separate what's a natural reaction and what's a
cultural-indoctrination reaction.
--
David H. Bailey
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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