Abstract
“The paths of harmony are tortuous,” wrote Arnold Schoenberg in his manuscript on the musical idea. They lead in all directions, approaching a starting point and leaving it again and again, leading astray, as they lend to a different point a momentary meaning that they soon take back again, producing climaxes that they know how to exceed, calling forth gigantic waves that ebb without coming to a standstill. Nevertheless, this seemingly random progress is based on a profound meaning that can be easily verified in music governed by tonality”. (1995:309-11) These words aptly describe Schoenberg’s dynamic model of tonality. Harmony creates states of rest and unrest-conditions which Schoenberg described as “centrifugal” and “centripetal” tendencies. He defined these relationships in terms of “distances” from the tonic, which he classified and graphically represented by the “chart of the regions” in Structural Functions of Harmony (1954:20,30,68-69). Schoenberg conceived of musical space in terms of two or more dimensions in which “musical ideas are presented as a unit.” Tonal function is multi-dimensional: pitches (i.e., scale-degrees), as well as chords and regions have either centripetal or centrifugal tendencies. They create states of rest or unrest, by either establishing the tonic region or undermining it. Schoenberg did not consider motivic processes as separate from harmony and large-scale tonal form, since a given motive implies certain tonal relationships.