Problems of Pitch Organization in Stravinsky
Arthur V. Berger · Perspectives of New Music · 1963
ANYONE WHO undertakes an investigation of the essential relationships of tones in the works of Stravinsky may find himself somewhat at a disadvantage as a result of the fact that no significant body of theoretical writing has emerged to deal with the nature of twentieth-century music that is centric (i.e. organized in terms of tone center) but not tonally functional.1 There are, to be sure, a number of labels in circulation for referring to this music: pantonality, pandiatonicism, antitonality, modality, tonicality-even atonality has been stretched to embrace it. But their function is largely identification, and where any one of them presumes to represent a theory, this is more likely to be descriptive of surface detail than in the nature of an interpretation of internal relations or structural significance. Moreover, instead of searching for the differentia of the music they designate by ascertaining, for example, its own unifying principles, the tendency has been to rely rather too heavily on the established rules of formation.