FPA 140 Lecture Notes - Lecture 18: Alate, Lewis Carroll, Organum
Document Summary
Music before the 1960s avoided conventions, especially functional harmonic progression. This is because modernism was all about searching for the new and avoiding the old. This doesn"t mean that tonality was discarded altogether. The return to tonality in minimalism was attractive to composers, even those who did not acknowledge minimalism as a valid style. By the early 1970s, the use of tonal quotations had peaked. Composers wanted something other than simply quoting tonal music. Led to a reconsideration of the possibilities of traditional tonality. The new tonality is sometimes called a new romanticism . New tonality entails a return to a compositional manner that had temporarily been abandoned. This return does not attempt to continue previous explorations (of wagner, who was the last pioneer of functional harmony), nor does it pretend that the entire twentieth century never existed. Postmodern explorations of tonality allowed the possibility of any type of tonality, or non-tonal methods.