University of Puget Sound Sound Ideas Summer Research 2011 From Modality to Tonality: The Reformulation of Harmony and Structure in Seventeenth-Century Music Lukas Perry University of Puget Sound,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://soundideas.pugetsound.edu/summer_research Part of the Musicology Commons, and the Music Theory Commons Recommended Citation Perry, Lukas, "From Modality to Tonality: The Reformulation of Harmony and Structure in Seventeenth-Century Music" (2011). Summer Research. Paper 78. http://soundideas.pugetsound.edu/summer_research/78 This Presentation is brought to you for free and open access by Sound Ideas. It has been accepted for inclusion in Summer Research by an authorized administrator of Sound Ideas. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. From Modality to Tonality: The Reformulation of Harmony and Structure in Seventeenth- Century Music Lukas Perry Summer Research Grant in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences University of Puget Sound Professor Geoffrey Block, Advisor August 3, 2011 1 Introduction After nearly a century of gradual infiltration of modality, which had reigned unchallenged for centuries, its replacement, the musical organization known as tonality (to be defined later), monopolized music from the late 1600s to the early 1900s. During its prominence, tonality stood alongside a march of confidence in the Western mindset. A faith in human reason shaped Western history until events of the early twentieth century cast it into doubt. The order and perfection pursued in tonal music might be seen as analogous to the same order and reason pursued in human action. For one, tonality’s inception mimicked the empirical attitude of the Enlightenment.