Henry Burnett, Roy Nitzberg

Composition, Chromaticism and the Developmental Process

A New Theory of Tonality

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Musicology, having been transmitted as a compilation of disparate events and disciplines, has long necessitated a 'magic bullet', a 'unified field theory' so to speak, that can interpret the steady metamorphosis of Western art music from late medieval modality to twentieth-century atonality within a single theoretical construct. Burnett and Nitzberg challenge the traditional understanding of development, and advance a new theory of eleven-pitch tonality as it relates to the corpus of Western composition. The book plots the evolution of tonality and its bearing on style and the compositional process itself. The authors move beyond existing theory and analysis to base their theory from the standpoint of chromatic 'pitch fields'. These fields are the specific chromatic pitch choices that a composer uses to inform and design a complete composition, utilizing specific chromatic inflections to control a large-scale working out process that is the very essence of 'development'. In short, the authors claim that a chromatic background that coexists with a diatonic contrapuntal background may define the process of compositional development. These chromatic and diatonic events are the two genus expressions of slowly unfolding tonic octaves.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: CRC Press
• Seitenzahl: 430
• Erscheinungstermin: 23. November 2007
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 234mm x 156mm x 24mm
• Gewicht: 776g
• ISBN-13: 9780754651628
• ISBN-10: 0754651622
• Artikelnr.: 23467078

Autorenporträt

Henry Burnett is Professor of Music and Roy Nitzberg is Visiting Lecturer both at the Aaron Copland School of Music, Queens College, The City University of New York, USA.

Inhaltsangabe

Contents: Preface
Prologue: a personal reflection
Introduction
11-pitch-class tonality
The modal gamut in the 16th century
Tonality and systems in the 17th and early 18th centuries
Tonality and systems in the mid- to late-18th century: the classical ideal
19th century approaches to 11-pitch-class systems derived from the Viennese classical tradition
11-pitch-class systems in the music of mid- to late-19th century Romantic composers
The Romantic avant garde and the rumblings of Modernism
Bibliography
Index.