Tonality is one way of organizing pitches — not the only way. Understanding the alternatives does not require abandoning tonality; it expands the tools available for musical expression.
PITCH ORGANIZATION SYSTEMS
All music organizes pitch in some way — it chooses which pitches are used, how they relate to each other, and which are more central and which more peripheral. Tonal harmony (discussed in lessons 3 and 4) is the dominant Western system from approximately 1600 to 1900. But it is not the only system.
MODES
- The medieval church modes — Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Aeolian, Locrian — are scales with different interval patterns from the major and minor scales. Each mode has a distinctive character:
- Dorian (D–E–F–G–A–B–C–D): minor with a raised sixth — the "jazzy" minor, used in folk music worldwide
- Phrygian (E–F–G–A–B–C–D–E): minor with a lowered second — gives Spanish flamenco its distinctive sound
- Lydian (F–G–A–B–C–D–E–F): major with a raised fourth — ethereal, suspended, used by Debussy and Ravel
- Mixolydian (G–A–B–C–D–E–F–G): major with a lowered seventh — the most common mode in folk and pop music
Twentieth-century composers (Bartók, Debussy, Ravel) used modal scales to evoke folk music, create non-tonal harmonic ambiguity, or avoid the directed harmonic pull of functional tonality.
PENTATONIC SCALES
A pentatonic scale uses five pitches per octave. The major pentatonic (C–D–E–G–A) is the foundation of vast amounts of folk music worldwide — East Asian, West African, Celtic, Native American. Its distinctive quality is the absence of semitones, which gives it an open, harmonically neutral sound.
The blues scale (C–E♭–F–F#–G–B♭) is a pentatonic variant with added chromatic inflections — the "blue notes" that give blues and jazz their characteristic feeling.
POST-TONAL PITCH ORGANIZATION
In the late nineteenth century, composers began pushing tonality to its limits — adding so much chromaticism that the sense of tonal center became ambiguous. By the early twentieth century, several composers had moved beyond tonality entirely.
Atonality: music that avoids establishing a tonal center. Schoenberg's early atonal works (Op. 11 piano pieces, 1909) were the first pieces in the Western tradition explicitly to abandon tonality.
Twelve-tone serialism: Schoenberg developed a method for systematically using all twelve chromatic pitches equally — the tone row. A tone row orders all twelve pitches; the composition uses the row and its transformations (inversion, retrograde, retrograde inversion, transpositions) as the primary organizational principle.
Serialism (integral serialism): Boulez, Stockhausen, and Babbitt extended the row principle to rhythm, dynamics, and other parameters — controlling all musical dimensions through serial organization.
SPECTRALISM
The spectral composers (Grisey, Murail) used the acoustic harmonic series as the basis for harmony — deriving chords from the overtone series of specific pitches, creating music that is neither tonal nor serial but acoustically derived.
MICROTONALITY
Western music uses 12 equally spaced semitones per octave — but this is not the only possible division. Quarter-tones (24 pitches per octave), 31-tone equal temperament, just intonation, and continuous microtonal slides all appear in twentieth-century and contemporary music.
Harry Partch built his own instruments tuned to 43-tone just intonation. La Monte Young's drone music explores the natural overtone series.
MODALITY IN POP AND JAZZ
Modal harmony is not exotic — it is the foundation of most pop music. Songs using Mixolydian progressions (I–♭VII–IV–I), Dorian minor, or Aeolian progressions are the norm in rock, folk, and R&B. The Beatles, Radiohead, and Kendrick Lamar all use modal harmony fluently.
MESSIAEN'S MODES OF LIMITED TRANSPOSITION
Olivier Messiaen developed his own systematic approach to pitch organization: the modes of limited transposition. These are scales that have fewer than twelve distinct transpositions because of their internal symmetry. The whole-tone scale, for example, has only two distinct transpositions (every starting pitch yields one of two scales). The octatonic scale (alternating whole steps and half steps) has only three distinct transpositions. Messiaen identified seven such modes and used them as the primary pitch material for his music.
Messiaen's compositions ("Quatuor pour la fin du temps," 1941; "Turangalîla-Symphonie," 1948; "Catalogue d'oiseaux," 1956-58) demonstrate the expressive potential of these modes. The modes are non-functional — they do not establish tonal centers or generate the V-I tension that powers Classical harmony — but they have characteristic colors that Messiaen exploited for both musical and spiritual purposes. The seventh mode, a ten-note symmetrical mode, produces what Messiaen described as bright, exhilarating harmonic effects he associated with religious ecstasy.
THE TWELVE-TONE METHOD IN DETAIL
Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone method (developed in the early 1920s, applied systematically from 1923 onward) organizes pitch by treating all twelve chromatic pitches as equal. The composer chooses an ordering of the twelve pitches — the tone row — and uses this row and its transformations as the source of all pitch material.
The transformations: prime (P, the original row), inversion (I, the row with all intervals reversed in direction), retrograde (R, the row backwards), retrograde inversion (RI, the inversion read backwards). Each form can be transposed to any of twelve starting pitches, yielding forty-eight forms of any row. A composer organizes these forty-eight forms into a matrix and selects forms strategically as the piece progresses.
The method enforces a strict discipline: no pitch may be repeated until all twelve have appeared. This rule (with various practical exceptions in actual compositional practice) prevents any pitch from gaining tonal-style centrality. The result is music in which all twelve pitches are equally important — atonality systematized.
Schoenberg's mature twelve-tone works ("Piano Concerto," 1942; "Violin Concerto," 1936; "Phantasy for Violin," 1949) demonstrate that the system can produce expressive music of great power. The technique is not the music; the music is what the composer makes with the technique.
WEBERN AND THE INTERVAL CLASS
Anton Webern, Schoenberg's student, took twelve-tone composition to an extreme of concentration. His late works (Symphony Op. 21, 1928; String Quartet Op. 28, 1938; Variations for Piano Op. 27, 1936) use tone rows constructed with special symmetries. The Symphony's row has the property that its second half is the retrograde of its first half (transposed by a tritone) — meaning the row contains itself in transformed form.
Webern's pieces are extremely short and extremely concentrated. The complete works fit on three CDs. Each piece operates with the precision of a crystal — every note is essential, every interval is meaningful, every silence is purposeful. The aesthetic is the opposite of the late Romantic excess that Schoenberg's generation was reacting against.
INTEGRAL SERIALISM
After World War II, composers including Pierre Boulez (in France), Karlheinz Stockhausen (in Germany), and Milton Babbitt (in the United States) extended serial organization to dimensions beyond pitch. Boulez's "Structures Ia" (1952) serializes pitch, rhythm, dynamics, and articulation — all four parameters are controlled by similar ordering procedures.
The aesthetic stance of integral serialism is extreme: the composer establishes the system, and the system generates the music. Personal expression and intuitive musical decisions are minimized in favor of systematic logic. The results sound, to many listeners, abstract and difficult — though performances by skilled interpreters reveal expressive content that the systems themselves do not predict.
Integral serialism was a relatively short historical phase. By the 1970s, even its original practitioners (Boulez and Stockhausen) had moved toward more flexible approaches. But the technical innovations of the integral serialist period — the careful systematic organization of musical parameters — influenced subsequent composition in ways that outlasted the strict serialist aesthetic.
PITCH-CLASS SET THEORY
The American theorist Allen Forte developed pitch-class set theory in the 1970s as a tool for analyzing atonal music. The theory groups chords and melodic fragments into sets based on their interval content, regardless of pitch level, octave displacement, or order of notes. This abstract approach allows analysts to identify relationships across atonal music that traditional harmonic analysis cannot detect.
For composers, set theory offers a vocabulary for thinking about pitch organization without reference to tonal hierarchies. The Forte numbers (each set has a standard identifier, like "set 3-3" or "set 6-Z44") become tools for composers who want to work systematically with specific interval collections.
NEO-TONAL APPROACHES
By the late twentieth century, many composers had returned to tonal or quasi-tonal approaches, but with the awareness that tonality is one option among many rather than the default. The compositional question became not "tonal or atonal?" but "what pitch organization serves this specific piece?"
Composers like John Adams, Steve Reich, and Arvo Pärt write music that is clearly tonal or modal — but their tonality is consciously chosen, with awareness of the alternatives. This neo-tonal approach uses traditional pitch organization in new ways: tonality without functional progressions (Adams), modality without functional cadences (Pärt), traditional pitch material in non-traditional rhythmic and textural contexts (Reich).
EXERCISE: MODAL COMPOSITION
Write eight bars using only the Dorian mode on D (D–E–F–G–A–B–C–D). Avoid the functional V7 → I resolution that characterizes tonal music — let the mode's ambiguity operate without being "resolved." Compare the result with an eight-bar passage in D minor using full tonal harmonic function. Note the difference in character. Then attempt a third version: write eight bars using only the pitches of a single twelve-tone row of your own invention. Notice how the constraint forces decisions you would not otherwise make — and how the absence of any pitch hierarchy changes the experience of the music's progression through time.