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Form and Tonal Spectrum in 12-Tone Music: Approaches to Analysis in Schoenberg, Walker, and Webern
(University of Oregon, 2023-03-24) Didier, Alex; Boss, Jack
Approaches to analysis in 12-tone music have been predominantly focused around the concept of atonality. Building off of ideas first imagined by theorists such as Heinrich Schenker and Arnold Schoenberg, I propose that all music can be understood as tonal using nature’s model, the overtone series. Through a detailed description of the organic nature of tonality, my work suggests that what was once understood as a dissonance can be reimagined as a new type of consonance. Analyzing passages of 12-tone music from Arnold Schoenberg, George Walker, and Anton Webern, I provide a means for expanding upon traditional Schenkerian Analysis, which has been traditionally limited to music of the 18th and 19th century. I suggest that all music with “tones” can be considered tonal, and that background-level graphs representing higher partials can be used to categorize musical passages as “more” or “less” tonal, in a traditional sense.