Philip Rupprecht, new co-edited volume, "Tonality Since 1950"

The volume is co-edited by Philip Rupprecht, with colleagues Felix Woerner (University of Basel) and Ullrich Scheideler (Humboldt-University, Berlin), and features 15 new chapters by North American and European scholars. 


Tonality Since 1950 documents the debate surrounding one of the most basic technical and artistic resources of music in the later 20th century. The flourishing of tonality – a return to key, pitch center, and consonance – in recent decades has under- mined received views of its disintegration or collapse ca. 1910, intensifying the discussion of music’s acoustical-theoretical bases, and of its broader cultural and metaphysical meanings. While historians of 20th-century music have often marginal- ized tonal practices, the present volume offers a new emphasis on emergent historical continuities. Musicians as diverse as Hindemith, the Beatles, Reich, and Saariaho have approached tonality from many different angles: as a figure of nostalgic longing, or as a universal law; as a quoted artefact of music’s sedimented stylistic past, or as a timeless harmonic resource. Essays by 15 leading researchers cover a wide repertoire of concert and pop/rock music composed in Europe and America over the past half-century.

Contributors

Ulrich Mosch, Wolfgang Rathert, Joseph Auner, Nicole Biamonte, Thomas Ahrend, Ullrich Scheideler, Felix Meyer, Judit Frigyesi, Keith Potter, Philip Rupprecht, Peter J. Schmelz, Eric Drott, Simone Heilgendorff, Felix Wörner, Volker Helbing