I’m working through Wallace Berry’s Structural Functions in Music, which has become a staple of the hapless graduate student’s reading list—at least judging by the $5 price for one of several used copies floating around Amazon’s marketplace. The prose is purple (Wallace Berry), and at times incomprehensible; the man loves listing synonymous adjectives, adverbs, nouns, and verbs to extend, prolong, embellish, and expand his prose… if you know what I mean.
His summary of thoughts on tonality on pages 169-183 is among the most condensed and lucid thinking I’ve encountered in the book. In particular, by formulating a theory of tonality which embraces as many different musical surface features as possible, Berry manages to point out some potential uniting features of cross-cultural and trans-historic works. I suppose it boils down to tension-and-release, but still, not that bad to think about doing some empirical work on. This sort of trend would sensibly be due to some basic psychological attribute, or at least some biologically-inspired basis.
In the meantime, I’m starting work at Echo Nest tomorrow in Davis Square—very excited! Also, I use an awful lot of em-dashes, and wordpress ought to implement a LaTeX-like triple hyphen, says I. Either that, for I have to flip to HTML-only editing, and make mad use of “—”.
