Wokół pojęcia tonalności w dziejach myśli o muzyce
The Idea of Tonality in the Theory of Music

Summary/Abstract: For centuries, musical works have been associated with the idea of order, harmony and beauty. From the nineteenth century, also on the basis of tonality (tonalité, Tonalität). The dispute over the concept of tonality is generally related to the question: is the principle of ordering in the world of sounds in the human mind, or in the phenomenon of harmonic series described by acoustics? The term tonalité was defined and propagated by François-Joseph Fétis (1784-1871), a Belgian theoretician, historian, and music critic who in his historical-theoretical work tried to define the principle of musical masterpieces composed over the centuries. Under the influence of Kant’s philosophy, this term referred to the properties of our mind, which seeks perfection and beauty in the world of sounds (in the art of composition). But in the works of Hugo Riemann and Arnold Schoenberg, the concept of Tonalität or tonality is connected not with the trait of the human mind, but with the ordering inherent in corps sonore (a harmonic series). Musicologists associated Riemann’s theory of music and his reflections on tonality with the term “harmonic tonality”, limiting the concept of tonality to the music of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and came up with the idea of the process of evolution of “harmonic tonality”. One of the basic concepts of Schoenberg’s theory of music is the term “monotonality”. The theory of “monotonality” – a new terminology and graphic characters – was to be used in order to logically describe the relationships between notes in a given score. Schoenberg assumed that each score could be interpreted as a logically coherent whole. He claimed that any sound systems created from the components of the chromatic scale are “related”, because their relationship is determined by the phenomenon of corps sonore – a series of overtones. In contemporary studies conducted by psychologists and musicologists the concept of tonality refers to the skills of shaping and recognizing melodies. They perceive tonality as a universal and innate property of our mind, which can be variously developed in different cultures. The term tonality is combined with the concept of “induction” and “instinct”.

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