Experiments with Scales, Intervals, and Key

    From the early seventeenth century until the end of the nineteenth, all Western European music has been based on tonality.  That is to say, it has been written in a major or minor key, with chords based on the key, and modulations related to the main key centre.  The chords have progressively become more discordant and chromatic, and the modulations have ranged further and further away from the key centre; but always there have been a key centre, to which everything has been related.

    Wagner stretched the principles of tonality to the utmost, both with regard to chords and key relationships.  So it was natural that twentieth-century composers should feel that they could go no further along that road, and should look for some new method of expressing themselves.

    Debussy began to make use of the whole tone scale (C D E F# G# A# C).  If you play this scale, or chords based on it, you will realize that it produces a very vague effect.  You lose the sense of tonality, because, when every interval is the same size, every note appears to be equally important.  There is, for example, no leading note rising a semitone to a tonic to help to produce a cadence.  And as only two scales exist (on C and C#), variety caused by modulation or key contrast is very limited.  Even Debussy only used the scale occasionally, and it has been used very little since.

    Other composers reverted to the ecclesiastical modes used by the sixteenth-century composers.  Vaughan Williams often made deliberate use of these; and his writing was much affected by Tudor music, as, for example, in his 'Fantasia on a Theme of Tallis'.  He even, occasionally, used an older style still, as in his G minor Mass, where he has much movement in parallel fourths and fifths, rather like the medieval organum.  Bartok, the Hungarian composer, also wrote much modal music, based on his researches in Hungarian folk melody.

    There was also an attempt to make use of scales with more than twelve notes to the octave.  The Czech, Alois Haba (1893-), has written music based on scales of quartertones and even sixth tones, though he has had few imitators.  To Western ears it merely sounds out of tune.  Also it is difficult to sing, and, except in the case of string instruments, it requires specially made instruments for its performance, so it is unlikely to have much future.  It is sometimes called "microtonal" music.

    Other composers have made an attempt to build chords other than on the usual classical system of thirds.  The Russian Scriabin (1872-1915) tried building chords of various sizes of fourths, taken from an artificially manufactured scale; and Schőnberg (1874-1951), at one stage, tried something similar, notably in his first chamber symphony.

    Another form of experiment has been to write in two or more keys at once (bi-tonality or poly-tonality).  This has been tried by a number of composers, including Strauss, Ravel, Milhaud (1892-), Honegger and Stravinsky.  But the ear finds it difficult to assimilate more than one key at a time, and either one key gains the ascendancy, or the impression is given of no key at all (atonality).  There arc occasions, however, when bi-tonality can give a very piquant effect.  

    Hindemith has invented a novel system of arbitrary relationships based on the complete chromatic scale.  He still believes in a tonal centre, but the application of his artificial system has produced some very unusual effects.  

    But perhaps the most talked-of innovation in this century has been that of the Austrian composer Schőnberg's use of tone rows, and his complete rejection of all forms of tonality.  He began by using the language of Wagner, though he thought in counterpoint rather than in harmony.  The cantata, the 'Gurrelieder', dates from this time.  But soon he set out to overthrow the key centre, and to write atonal music, in which all the twelve sounds of the chromatic scale were equally important.  He rebelled against the harmonic idioms of the nineteenth century, and turned to Bach for his rhythm and counterpoint.  'Pierrot Lunaire' for speaking voice and five instrumentalists is an atonal work of this period.  By 1923 he had evolved a new technique called “serial composition" or "twelve note technique", in which he based each composition on a different series of notes, consisting of all the twelve sounds of the chromatic scale, taken not scale-wise but in some arbitrary order, which he called a "tone row" (i.e. a row of notes).  Gradually a whole new system was built on these tone rows.  Having once been stated, the series could be transposed, inverted, or played backwards, or segments of it could be grouped into chords.  The notes could appear in any rhythm, so that a kind of a tune resulted, but usually with such extraordinary intervals between one note and the next that the effect was completely atonal.

    Schőnberg wrote many works using this new technique, one of the best known being his extremely difficult violin concerto.  They created much opposition, and in 1933 he was dismissed from his post in Berlin, to which town he had moved from his native Vienna.  He eventually settled in America, where he died in 1951.  He had many pupils, both in Europe and America, two of the best known being his compatriots, Berg (1885-1935) (who wrote the opera 'Wozzeck') and Webern (1883-1945).  But although Schőnberg’s theories were given to the world as long ago as 1923, and although he has had many disciples, his ideas have not, so far, been generally accepted, even by musicians, and time alone will show whether they have a lasting effect on the course of music.  

    Finally, mention should perhaps be made of the German experiments in electrophonic music, and the French “musique concrete", both of which began about 1948. Neither of these are "music" as the term is generally understood.  The former consists of sounds produced by electrophonic instruments, and the latter of ' natural sounds which are combined or deliberately distorted, and both are recorded on tape.  They will obviously be useful as "background" effects for film, radio and television, but whether they will have a future as a new kind of "music", it is too early to say.