Crossword clues for tonality
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Tonality \To*nal"i*ty\, n. [Cf. F. tonalit['e].] (Mus.) The principle of key in music; the character which a composition has by virtue of the key in which it is written, or through the family relationship of all its tones and chords to the keynote, or tonic, of the whole.
The predominance of the tonic as the link which
connects all the tones of a piece, we may, with
F['e]tis, term the principle of tonality.
--Helmholtz.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
1824, from tonal + -ity.
Wiktionary
n. 1 (context music English) The system of seven tones built on a tonic key; the 24 major and minor scales. 2 (context music English) A sound of specific pitch and quality; timbre. 3 (context music English) The quality of all the tones in a composition heard in relation to the tonic. 4 The interrelation of the tones in a painting.
WordNet
Wikipedia
Tonality is a musical system that arranges pitches or chords to induce a hierarchy of perceived relations, stabilities, and attractions. The pitch or triadic chord with the greatest stability is called the tonic, and the root of the tonic chord is considered to be the key of a piece or song. Thus a piece in which the tonic chord is C major is said to be "in the key of C". The most common use of the term ..."is to designate the arrangement of musical phenomena around a referential tonic in European music from about 1600 to about 1910" . Contemporary classical music from 1910 to the 2000s may practice or avoid any sort of tonality—but harmony in almost all Western popular music remains tonal. Harmony in jazz music includes many, if not all, tonal characteristics, while having different properties from common practice classical music.
"All harmonic idioms in popular music are tonal, and none is without function" . Tonality is an organized system of tones (e.g., the tones of a major or minor scale) in which one tone (the tonic) becomes the central point for the remaining tones. In tonality, the tonic (tonal center) is the tone of complete relaxation, the target toward which other tones lead . The cadence in which the dominant chord resolves to the tonic chord plays an important role in establishing the tonality of a piece.
"Tonal music is music that is unified and dimensional. Music is unified if it is exhaustively referable to a precompositional system generated by a single constructive principle derived from a basic scale-type; it is dimensional if it can nonetheless be distinguished from that precompositional ordering" .
The term tonalité originated with Alexandre-Étienne and was borrowed by François-Joseph Fétis in 1840 (; ; ; ; ). According to Carl Dahlhaus, however, the term tonalité was only coined by Castil-Blaze in 1821 (; ).
Although Fétis used it as a general term for a system of musical organization and spoke of types de tonalités rather than a single system, today the term is most often used to refer to major–minor tonality, the system of musical organization of the common practice period. Major-minor tonality is also called harmonic tonality (in the title of Carl , translating the German harmonische Tonalität), diatonic tonality, common practice tonality, functional tonality, or just tonality.
Usage examples of "tonality".
In the existence of each of them we meet again, in various forms and tonalities, the same anti-Hegelian novelistic model, or the same antimodel: that of the deserter, the person who chooses not to confront the world anymore, to abandon the fight, to disappear.
A white amaurosis, apart from being etymologically a contradiction, would also be a neurological impossibility, since the brain, which would be unable to perceive the images, forms and colours of reality, would likewise be incapable, in a manner of speaking, of being covered in white, a continuous white, like a white painting without tonalities, the colours, forms and images that reality itself might present to someone with normal vision, however difficult it may be to speak, with any accuracy, of normal vision.
The monody and empyrical tonality of the ancients gave place to polyphony and harmonized melodies resting upon the relations of tones in key.
In the direction of the musically elaborative element we have the schools of the Netherlands and of Italy, in which absolutely everything of this kind was realized which modern art can show, saving perhaps the fugue, which involved questions of tonality belonging to a grade of taste and harmonic perception more advanced and refined than that as yet attained.
It should be noted in this connection also that not all scales present an equally good opportunity of having their tones used as a basis for tonality or key-feeling: neither the chromatic nor the whole-step scale possess the necessary characteristics for being used as tonality scales in the same sense that our major and minor scales are so used.
The characteristic compositions of Strawinsky and Ornstein, too, have no tonality, lack every vestige of a pure chord, and exhibit unanalyzable harmonies, and rhythms of a violent novelty, in the most amazing conjunctions.
Floyt could almost hear its eerie tonalities and deep, nearly subsonic hum.