Book title: Everyday Tonality
Subtitle: Towards a tonal theory of what most people hear.
Author: Philip Tagg
Published by The Mass Media Scholars’ Press, Inc.,
New York & Montréal (2009).
iv + 334 pages. ISBN/EAN 978-0-9701684-4-3.
49 charts, figures and tables.
160 music examples.
Glossary, full reference listings, extensive index.
Full-size front cover.

More info
To know more about this excellent book, read this description and/or the summary of all 13 chapters and/or take a look at the samples listed next. Please note that the numerous hyperlinks in the complete downloadable book don’t work in these sample files.

Samples
• Table of Contents
• Chapter 8 — Chords
• Index

Description

Dominant, subdominant, perfect cadence ——three common concepts in conventional music theory—— and very useful too; at least if you’re studying European art music, most sorts of jazz, as well as some types of popular music. But what if you want to know about tonality in blues-based rock, or gospel, or soul, or classic R&B, or raj, or flamenco, or son-bolero, or traditional music from The British Isles, or popular music from the Balkans? A lot of that music contains no dominant, no subdominant, no perfect cadence and works just fine, thank you very much. So the question isn't whether ‘everyday tonality’ works ——it does!—— but how it works.

To answer that question in Everyday Tonality I use as much as I can of conventional music theory. I try to give no-nonsense definitions and explanations of rudimentary concepts like note, pitch, tone, tuning, octave, interval, mode, melody, circle of fifths, etc. so they can be applied to a much wider range of musics than usual. But I also have to tidy up the considerable mess caused by music theory’s bizarre notions of basic concepts like tonality, polyphony and triad. That means introducing some new terms and adapting institutionally less familiar models to do the job.

Modality and modal harmony are central to the understanding of non-classical tonality. I cover them in some detail. Two widely used complementary systems of chord symbols (roman numerals and lead-sheet shorthand) are explained and illustrated. Everyday Tonality contains no mumbo-jumbo about rootless double dominants with minor ninths (‘dim.’ chords to working musicians), subdominant six-fives or ‘functional harmony’, but I do use (and explain) concepts like ‘aeolian shuttle’, ‘plagal chord extension’, ‘mixolydian loop’ and ‘bimodal reversibility’ to make at least some theoretical sense of tonality used by artists like Pink Floyd, Human League and Carlos Puebla.

I wrote the first half of the book with first-year music students in mind. That covers basic theory, including note, tone, timbre, pitch, interval, melody, mode, polyphony and classical harmony. It also includes a chapter on non-classical harmony, divided into two parts: [1] tertial modal harmony; [2] quartal harmony.

The book's second half is aimed more at colleagues and graduate students. It deals with single chords that contain several, with chord shuttles (to and fro between two chords) and loops (vamps and other short, consecutively repeated three- or four-chord patterns). I would have liked to go on to larger units and processes but I thought the book was long enough already. As a final reality check after lots of structural theory, the last chapter discusses the four chords of the Obama campaign video and their connotations. Tonal choices are after all not just a technical issue: they're also choices about what sort of message you want to send.

Summary of chapters

Chapter 1. There is much confusion about very basic terms in music theory. Note, pitch and tone are three of them. This chapter discusses and defines those terms. Extra attention is paid to cleaning up the conceptual chaos of the words tonal and tonality as they are used in conventional Western music theory.

Chapter 2 continues with notions of pitch, focusing on questions of tuning and the octave. This chapter is the most acoustic-physics-orientated of them all and provides a theoretical basis for understanding how tones (as in ‘tonality’) work.

Chapter 3 deals with modes as tonal vocabulary or ‘pitch pools’. After distinguishing between scale and mode, and after discussing the conceptual problem of modality in a tradition of musical learning whose objects of study are overwhelmingly ‘monomodal’ (ionian), the widespread practice of pentatonicism is presented, as are the equally popular heptatonic ‘church’ modes. This chapter concentrates on melodic aspects of modality. Modal harmony is dealt with in Chapters 7 and 12.

Chapter 4 is on melody. After an exposition of its defining characteristics, melody is presented according to two typologies, one based on contour (different patterns of up and down), the other on connotation. Melodic identity is discussed in terms of tonal vocabulary, bodily movement, spoken language, varying patterns of repetition and, using concepts from rhetoric, its varying modes of presentation. The chapter ends with brief section on melisma.

Chapter 5 starts by trying to clear up another conceptual mess in conventional Western music theory —polyphony. After that, various categories of polyphony are defined and explained, including drone-accompanied music, heterophony, homophony and counterpoint.

Chapter 6 is the first of several on harmony. A brief definition and history of the concept is followed by a presentation of (European) ‘classical harmony’. After tidying up yet another conceptual mess relating to notions like ‘functional’ and ‘triadic’, the essential term tertial is explained and the basic rules and mechanisms of classical harmony, central to many popular styles from parlour song and polka to bebop jazz, are presented. Also included in the chapter are notions of harmonic directionality, as well as the principles of the circle-of-fifths or ‘key clock’.

Chapter 7, Non-classical harmony, deals first with the workings of tertial modal harmony, explaining things like the importance of major common triads in establishing the identity of various modes, the option of permanent Picardy thirds in the tonic triad of minor-key modes, and the link between minor pentatonicism and dorian rock harmony. There’s also a useful chart of typical progressions in each mode and examples of recordings in which they occur. The chapter’s second half is devoted entirely to quartal as opposed to tertial harmony.

Chapter 8 is simply called ‘Chords’. After the customary definition section, this chapter basically enumerates, describes and explains how a wide variety of tertial chords can be referred to in two complementary and useful ways: roman numeral designation and lead-sheet chord shorthand. The chapter also includes several extensive tables, including a chord recognition chart and a key to over fifty lead-sheet chords, all with the same note as root. The principles of lead-sheet chord designation are explained in detail, complete with anomalies and exceptions.

The title of Chapter 9, ‘One-chord changes’, is intentionally contradictory because it basically shows how one single chord is, in many types of popular music, rarely just ‘one chord’. After refuting prejudices about harmonic impoverishment in popular music and describing the fundamentals of present-time experience, I demonstrate how the single chord of G major becomes, in popular recordings, two or three different chords in sixteen different ways. In this chapter I argue that the tonal elaboration of single chords is an intrinsic part of the ‘groove’ identifying different styles of music.

Chapter 10, ‘Chord shuttles’, increases the number of chords from one to two. Drawing mainly on English-language popular song, a typology of chord shuttles is presented (supertonic, dorian, plagal, quintal, submediantal, aeolian and subtonic). Examination of shuttles in several songs, including ‘The Great Gig In The Sky’ from Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon (1973) and the Human League hit Don’t You Want Me Baby (1981), shows that chord shuttles often involve ambiguous tonics and that no overriding keynotes can be established. I argue that chord shuttles are ongoing tonal constellations. They are by definition non-transitional and constitute building blocks in the harmonic construction of form in many types of popular song.

Chapter 11, ‘Chord loops 1’, expands the number of chords from two to three and four. After defining loop, the vamp, one of the most famous loops in popular music is examined. Distinction is made between loop and turnaround. The chapter ends with an explanation of the gradual but radical historical shift from the vamp’s V-I directionality to more ‘modal’ types of harmony in rock-, soul- and folk-influenced styles.

Chapter 12,’Modal Loops and bimodality’ attacks the problem of understanding how modal harmony really works, with how the same chord sequence can be heard in two different modes, etc. Starting with distinction and confusion between ionian and mixolydian, this chapter sets out ways of establishing, where relevant, a single tonic for particular sequences, the role of individual chords within loops, etc. It then examines aeolian and phrygian loops, and proposes a model of bitonal reversibility in efforts to conceptualise harmonic practices quite foreign to what is generally taught to music theory students. The chapter’s final section distinguishes between various mediantal loops like the ‘rock dorian’, the ‘folk dorian’, the ‘narrative ionian mediantal’.

Chapter 13, ‘The Yes We Can chords’, focuses on one single chord loop —that used in the online video supporting Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008— and discusses the connotative value of that chord loop and its contribution to creating the sort of cross-cultural unity that Obama clearly wanted to forge. The main point is that the analysis of music’s tonal parameters should not solely be an arcane technical exercise foisted on music students but, more importantly, a contribution to understanding the basic question of music semiotics: ‘why and how does who communicate what to whom and with what effect?’