Number as Form and Content: A Composer's Path of Inquiry
Brian Evans · Leonardo · 1992
In tonal music, time passes through the interplay of harmonic forces striving for stability-tension to resolution, dissonance to consonance. Over the past century many new musical grammars have been invented and investigated with the aim of building temporal architectures with sound. Chromaticism has made possible extremes of harmonic, and consequently emotional, manipulation. From the late Romantics to the American conservatives to Hollywood film composers, common-practice tonality has been stretched to its atonal limits [1 ]. In 1911, 12 years before developing his 12-tone system, Schoenberg said,