Dmitri Tymoczko > Quotes

“I will argue that five features are present in a wide range of genres, Western and non-Western, past and present, and that they jointly contribute to a sense of tonality: 1. Conjunct melodic motion. Melodies tend to move by short distances from note to note. 2. Acoustic consonance. Consonant harmonies are preferred to dissonant harmonies, and tend to be used at points of musical stability. 3. Harmonic consistency. The harmonies in a passage of music, whatever they may be, tend to be structurally similar to one another. 4. Limited macroharmony. I use the term “macroharmony” to refer to the total collection of notes heard over moderate spans of musical time. Tonal music tends to use relatively small”
― Dmitri Tymoczko, A Geometry of Music: Harmony and Counterpoint in the Extended Common Practice

“By contrast, the three other features—conjunct melodic motion, limited macroharmony, and centricity—are common to virtually all human music. This near universality may be attributable, at least in part, to features of our biological inheritance.10”
― Dmitri Tymoczko, A Geometry of Music: Harmony and Counterpoint in the Extended Common Practice

“The goal of this book is to understand tonality afresh—to provide some new theoretical tools for thinking about tonal coherence, and to illuminate some of the hidden roads connecting modern tonality to that of the past. My aim is to retell the history of Western music so that twentieth-century tonality appears not as an”
― Dmitri Tymoczko, A Geometry of Music: Harmony and Counterpoint in the Extended Common Practice

“Finally, we often hear some pitches or notes as being more important (or “central”) than others. These pitches tend to serve as points of musical arrival, to which others are heard as “leading” or “tending.” Thus, one and the same sequence of notes—such as that”
― Dmitri Tymoczko, A Geometry of Music: Harmony and Counterpoint in the Extended Common Practice

“Of these five features, harmonic consistency is clearly the most culturally specific. The idea that music should consist of rapidly changing chords is a deeply Western idea, in a double sense: it is deep, insofar as it characterizes much Western music since before the Renaissance; and it is Western, since there are many cultures in which the notion of a “chord progression” simply plays no role. (Many traditional non-Western styles are purely monophonic, or feature an unchanging “drone” harmony;”
― Dmitri Tymoczko, A Geometry of Music: Harmony and Counterpoint in the Extended Common Practice

“I was somewhat surprised, therefore, to find that my college teachers—famous academics and composers—inhabited an entirely different musical universe. They knew nothing about, and cared little for, the music I had grown up with. Instead, their world revolved around the dissonant, cerebral music of Arnold Schoenberg and his followers. As I quickly learned, in this environment not everything was possible: tonality was considered passé and “unserious”; electric guitars and saxophones were not to be mixed with violins and pianos; and success was judged by criteria I could not immediately fathom. Music, it seemed, was not so much to be composed as constructed—assembled painstakingly, note by note, according to complicated artificial systems. Questions like “does this chord sound good?” or “does this compositional system produce likeable music?” were frowned upon as naive or”
― Dmitri Tymoczko, A Geometry of Music: Harmony and Counterpoint in the Extended Common Practice