Tonality 1900-1950: Concept and Practice

Tonality - or the feeling of key in music - achieved crisp theoretical definition in the early 20th century, even as the musical avant-garde pronounced it obsolete. The notion of a general collapse or loss of tonality, ca. 1910, remains influential within music historiography, and yet the textbook narrative sits uneasily with a continued flourishing of tonal music throughout the past century. Tonality, from an early 21st-century perspective, never did fade from cultural attention; but it remains a prismatic formation, defined as much by ideological-cultural valences as by its role in technical understandings of musical practice. Tonality 1900-1950: Concept and Practice brings together new essays by 15 leading American and European scholars.

Felix Worner is a research associate and Lecturer in the Music Department of the University of Basel and serves as co-editor of the Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft fur Musiktheorie. Ullrich Scheideler is Head of Music Theory at Humboldt-University in Berlin and a former editor of the Arnold Schoenberg Critical Edition. Philip Rupprecht is Professor of Music at Duke University. He is the author of British Musical Modernism: the Manchester Group and their Contemporaries and editor of Rethinking Britten.