Pitch Frames as Melodic Archetypes

Abstract

In our history we have recognized scales of some variety as keystones to music's pitch structure. And yet, empirical studies of perception and archeological appraisals of human evolution confirm an unchanging cognitive/perceptual ground for the musical experience; they render the ragas and modes and tonoi and scales of the past to be understood only as "local" explanations for things better understood by the space/time kinetics of limited elements rather than by frozen note paradigms. This paper concludes that an empirical study of music from a broad variety of times and cultures argues for a more elemental basis: thus coinage of the tonality frame. This conceptualization reunites harmonic nucleus with temporal span, meshing as well with ancient and exotic conceptualizations of hierarchical patterning. MUSICIANS have contended with at least three explanations of pitch coherence over the past three centuries. They were forced to grapple with even more when dealing with music from outside the WestEuropean orbit.One of the three, the 12-tone world initiated by Schoenberg, is of no concern to us here; after three-quarters of a century, it continues to lack confirmation from studies of perception as more than a compositional tool.[1] The other two conceptualizations, modality and tonality, were conceived as attempts to explain something of music's perceived pitch structure. Each carries the birthmark of its origins, the ontological canons that dominated its era. In the rhetoric of learned musicians the two theories are separated, as if mutually exclusive.This convention demands that music of Western civilization composed between 900 and 1600-give or take a half-century on either end-is modal. Its taxonomy is confined to the diatonic set (with the preGuidonian exception of B-flat), whose permuted orderings by finalis yield eight modes.[2] Then music created after the 17 th -century deadline is routinely lumped into a different pitch-structural taxonomy: it is tonal, not modal. And then tonal conditions of that duality are sometimes further refined as either of classical tonality, functional tonality, or harmonic tonality. The modal/tonal separation boasts an imposing birthright: the revered legacy of the Rameau-Riemann-Schenker triumvirate. Each in his own way defined pitch organization as a product of major or minor scales set into certain orderings of chords.But we must ask: "Has humanity evolved in such a way that different pitch resources have been demanded as the centuries rolled by?" [3] Must that development be thought of only as a few-to-many pitch progression, with primitive pentatonic (or fewer) leading on through modality into the Enlightenment's diatonic, and hence to the dodecaphonic of 20 th century fame? There are "evolutionary" exceptions noted on occasion from the modal/tonal duality, even beyond obvious instances of antique resonances, like those in the music of Bruckner or Vaughn-Williams. Thus Debra Mawer tells us [4] that Milhaud and Stravinsky favored "modality over tonality," as if th...