Tonality - The Musical Element you love to hate

This weekend, I finished the latest piece I've been working on and a few days ago, I finished putting the score into Finale.

Now I know what it sounds like but just for my own amusement, I like to use the playback option in Finale. It really lets me sit back and listen externally to what I've conceived, admire that which I like and change that which I don't like (although, to be quite honest, I change relatively nothing - I don't write anything down unless it's finished in my head and by that time I've worked it over and over again so that the aspect of writting music, at least for me, is a matter of dictation...the chicken scratches are in my head).

Anyway, I converted the playback file to an mp3 format in I-tunes and sent the result to myself to download to my own I-tunes library at home. I then got the idea to send it off to one of my professors...the teacher of my 20th Century Music class, someone whom I respect, admire, and emulate much more than I will admit to anyone.

And although I respect him and admire him a great deal, we diverge into two different paths when it comes to compostion, the former preferring a more abstract, atonal style of composition as oppossed to me who composes in a very tonal (albeit dissonant and chromatic) style of composition.

Acutally, I like atonality. Often I find the sounds of dissonance are more pleasing to me than any sonorities of resolution or even hints in that direction. I love the spiky dischord that characterizes this music and yet all of it so logically and painstackingly written. It's all wonderful stuff and just as expressive and descriptive as the most expansive Mahler orchestral canvas.

But it's not the way I conceive music. I have no greater interest in music right now than to understand the theory and construction behind these formidible and poignant works and the unbearable tension and intensity created by dissonance, dense texture and/or complex rhythm within them render me a captive listener but I cannot, I am unwilling to write this kind of music. It doesn't come from me.

It worries me only because I am not a progressive. People were writting the music I am now writing, hundreds of years ago. I may seek to fuse elements of today with elements of yesturday, but I am no modern trailblazer and in a society were connosseurs are looking for the "daring" and "shocking" and "new", I must seem "altmodisch" to not only musicians but also to listeners as well.

Not that I wish to cater to the public. I don't and I think that any composer who does without remaining true to his intuitive creative side is a coward. Say what you have to say. Peer pressure in this instance produces superficial effects and I personally believe that composers ought to write music of lasting significance and inspiration for the coming generations.

I am outnumbered. Most every new classical composer is constantly pushing the envelopment, not just with atonalism and total serialism but now they are heading to a philosophical level and asking the most basic question of all "what is music". But their musical products conceived that attempt to answer this question are make progressive steps foward. Every generation of composers it seems, makes one step ahead of the previous generation and since no one has yet said "enough is enough" this continues toward obscure and sometimes incomprehensible results.

Not my stuff but I worry. Are the melodies predicatable, the harmonies overused, the rhythms commonplace, the form conventional? Is this how my stuff will be seen? Will I be known as a composer who had talent but was a coward and refused to put a foot foward? I wonder if my professor sees me this way. He's progressive himself. My stuff at times must seem puerile to him.

Is there any room for tonality? I keep a written journal and this question within the last month or so, resurfaces many times.

I voiced my concerns to Meredith earlier this evening, in no less eloquent terms, and without so much as batting an eye, she looked up from the towels she was squeezing in her dresser drawer, turned to me and almost indifferently asked: "Is it from your soul". I answered in the affirmative. "Then what are you worried about?"

She has a great point and I shut up after that. I still worry about the lasting power of my music but at least I'm true to myself.

Ironically, I'm currently pirating a bunch of 20th Century compositions of my professor's listening log URL by composers Ligeti, Xenakis, Messaien, Penderecki, Bartok and Berio to name a few and importing them into my I-tunes here at home.

G'night.