Rethinking Tonality

Or why I don't like the idea of "tonal ambiguity".

For a long time, I've felt that the way we talk about keys is maybe a bit... outdated? Like, clearly keys matter, but there seems to be this disconnect between the formalized way we think about them and the way musicians actually use them. Over the years I've become increasingly convinced that keys don't matter nearly as much as we seem to think they do, and in this video I'd like to talk a bit about why.

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Also, thanks to Jareth Arnold for proofreading the script to make sure this all makes sense hopefully!

[tone]

Some additional thoughts/corrections:

1) It occurs to me that one could hear the section on the blues as me saying you shouldn't say a song is "in A blues" or whatever, but to be clear, that wasn't my point. Songs that use blues tonality can absolutely be described as using blues tonality. My point is that describing it that way is not functionally equivalent to placing it in a key. Just want to clarify that 'cause I'm not sure I was clear enough in the script.

2) Technically the solo from Sweet Home Alabama isn't strictly G major pentatonic. (Which is why I said mostly.) There's some Bbs running around in there too, and maybe some other notes I missed as well, I didn't transcribe it that closely. Didn't seem worth the digression in the script but I wanted to put it here in case anyone cares.

3) For another example where understanding the local tonal hierarchy is more important for soloing than identifying the global key, consider Coltrane's Giant Steps. The entire idea is that you're cycling through three different keys at a rate of 1-2 bars each at an extremely fast tempo, so you have to be constantly changing your melodic vocabulary in order to keep up. Declaring one of them to be the "real" key is fundamentally useless when you're trying to decide which notes to play when.

[nicholasorr]

This reminds me of a Debussy quote - "Works of art make rules. Rules do not make works of art."

The "rules" and theoretical frameworks we use to understand and analyse music, such as key centres, really just come from a period of practice - composers tend to use pitches in 'these' ways with 'these' relationships between notes, and so therefore we can understand a theoretical basis that works for that music. However no composer should feel bound or limited by the 'rules' - because "if it sounds good, it is good!" And different periods and cultures of music have given us completely different theoretical bases for understanding that music, which don't always translate well between.

Fundamentally what even is music? It's just organised sound. The way that each musician and each composer organises the sounds they can make is ultimately up to them. The same as how I wouldn't walk into your kitchen and tell you how you should organise your cupboards just because I might organise my own house a certain way, I wouldn't say to a musician who's organised their sounds (in this case, pitches) in a certain way that they're wrong - on the proviso that it sounds good.

Equally, in reality - I'm a high school music teacher and in a position of trying to give my students a level of understanding that can birth and inform creativity. One of the most common pieces of advice I give to new composers is they need to pick a key centre and use it - because otherwise the piece lacks coherence and sounds like a disorganised mess. After all - "You have to know the rules to break them".

Side note - for another great example of tonal ambiguity where you wouldn't expect it, look up "Revelation Song". It's a religious/worship song, but the particular relationship between melody and chords leaves it open to interpretation - similar to Sweet Home Alabama in this way. If you choose to hear it in D (the opening chord), you can and it makes sense. If you choose to hear it in G (the more technically applicable key given the note choices), you can and it makes sense. You can try to hear it in both at the same time and it really messes with you.

[JohnathanWhitehorn]

when 12 tone starts wondering about something we’re in for a treat

[alexr]

6:32 "...including it anyway for completeness" - draws golden flying strawberry.
I felt that.

[insertfunnynamehere]

6:31 did you just put a Celeste reference in a music theory video
I love this channel so much

[solorzanotenor]

I loved how "the single most important note, THE ONE AGAINST WHICH ALL OTHER NOTES ARE GONNA BE COMPARED" doodle was non other than SHREK.

[seth_piano]

My all-important official opinion on Sweet Home Alabama:
When I first heard it, I thought it was in the key of D. I was an untrained power-chord playing rock musician, and the song started on D, therefore it was in D.

After I got trained in "classical western common practice harmony", I learned to hear it in G, because five four one and tonic resolution and all that fun stuff.

Neither way was wrong, and the context matters! For me, the context was interacting with it at different stages of my learning. Same person, new lens to see it through, and at the end of the day though...who cares. :)

[wareya]

shoutouts to all the metal and post-hardcore music with IV-V-vi-vi chord loops that resolve to IV at the end of the song and make you go "wait no i don't understand"

[lucasduque]

Personally, I've noticed I barely think of key when playing or composing. I tend to think of the individual chords and their relations more than a key.

Usually when I need to share it with someone I need to go through the struggle of figuring out the "key I was playing in"

[KRSsven]

As someone not classically trained, keys are getting to be understandable but are also maddening. It’s not just the complete lack of help those who are trained in music offer (I’ve had such gems as ‘it’s easy’ and ‘just find the key’ when asking something as simple as how you find the key of a song), it can also be frustrating to even work out in the types of music I like, such as grunge/alternative.

[SolarFederate]

I think this is all very astute. There are plenty of examples of musicians who don’t think of keys at all when they write their music, which often times leads their music to avoid description by a traditional key approach. Allan Holdsworth for example exclusively thought in amorphous pitch collections, both for chordal writing and theory

[duelinmarkers]

This is great.

My attempt at defining "musical key:" a frame of reference for communicating and thinking about musical harmony and melody, comprised of a named base or home pitch and a named or implied set of relationships to other pitches relative to the base pitch.

[singerofsongss]

“You don’t want to just smash out notes and hope it works.” But.... isn’t that just ✨spicy jazz✨?

[mattdeblassmusic]

I literally just came here from my weekly voice lesson where my teacher and I were having a discussion on this. She has me grab a random folk song from a book and we work on sight singing it, and today the one I picked seemed to modulate between F major and D major, and we spent the whole sight singing part of the lesson trying to figure out which solfege syllables to assign to which parts. It was fun

[seanperkinsmusic]

Phil Tagg; Tonical Neighborhoods is another grest tool. I think you've mentioned him in a video before. I love his Everyday Tonality. Thank you for the great videos

[TheCraftyCrafter]

your use of the term "gravity" really helped me grasp this concept. Thank you!

[FooFighter]

For me it's the beauty of music, it's an artform. So how you create something is your choice. I am rather a analytical composer, but you can also follow your emotions. Actually there aren't really any rules, the tools are there, but you don't have to use them.

[barthydemusic]

Mentions "profound impact", shows a doodle of an asteroid speeding toward a dinosaur.😂

[dambotg]

Arguing about keys is indeed boring. Yet still interesting enough to argue about. I like the blues approach of not worrying too much much about tonality but instead focusing on what sounds good. Cause after all music is music and it's not about the specific albeit useful details that help us understand a song, It's about the song itself and if it's rockin.

[Teemu_TV]

Thank you for this interesting video, 12tone. Tonality and harmonic ambiguity are one of my all time favourite concepts and that's what was the theme of my Master's thesis. Since then I have actively been rethinking the whole harmonic system and trying to create a model I call "local functions" where keys (in the traditional sense) are pretty much thrown in the bin. The point of this model is to focus on adjacent chords and their relationship. Say, in a bVI-bVII-I progression it's more interesting to analyze bVI in relation to bVII (as a weak "major 2nd dominant") as to I. In fact, the same applies to ol' good IV-V-I where I don't see IV as a subdominant but a weak dominant to V. This model is still on progress and I'd be happy to publish a book or make a video series about it later.

When I was analyzing through every #1 song in the Billboard singles list I found myself in a trouble when trying to decide the key for many of the songs; especially post 2000s. In fact, I labeled some possible keys on them instead of just one definitive key. Modern pop songs really play on Ionian/Aeolian harmony in such a way that either of the tonic chords of these modes aren't established so strongly that one could decide the key without question. For exaomple the cliche progression Am-F-C-G can easily achieve this. I'd be tempted to continue work in the university and conduct research on humans in the cross-field of perceptual psychology and musicology. The tests should contain music excerpts utilizing different harmonic vocabularies so that the human subjects can decide which tones seem fitting and what tone feels tonic the most. So, it would be a lot like what Krumhansl did back in the days.

I think that music theorists tend to neglect the actual listener's psychology when analyzing tonality and instead they rely on established theoretical models, which limits the analysis and musical thinking in a broad sense. Tonality is all about what the listener expects to hear both in relation to what he/she has already heard in the piece and what kind of music he/she has heard through his/her life. This creates intuitive tonal hierarchies in the listener's mind, which have an important job making sense out of the music. At least in the Western world, Ionian dominates everywhere so strongly that it has to have impact on just about everyone's musical cognition more or less. Zooming into the next layer, the listener might be a dedicated rock musician so that Mixolydian might be represtented as the default mode; at least in rock... and so on. It would be an enormous task to try and map out something like this of course.

Good job, it's always a pleasure to watch your videos.
-Teemu