Stories of Tonality in the Age of François-Joseph Fétis

Stories of Tonality in the Age of François-Joseph Fétis

Stories of Tonality in the Age of François-Joseph Fétis

Thomas Christensen

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2019 by The University of Chicago

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Published 2019

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-62692-5 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-62708-3 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226627083.001.0001

This book has been supported by the James R. Anthony Endowment of the American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Christensen, Thomas Street, author.

Title: Stories of tonality in the age of François-Joseph Fétis / Thomas Christensen.

Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018048194 | ISBN 9780226626925 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226627083 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Tonality—History—19th century. | Music theory—History—19th century. | Fétis, François-Joseph, 1784–1871.

Classification: LCC ML3811.C47 2019 | DDC 781.2/6—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018048194

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Clara, Edward, and Katharine

Mes muses trois

Contents

Prologue

1.  Tonal Imaginations

2.  Chant

3.  Origins

4.  Song

5.  Orienting Tonality

6.  Theory

7.  Tonal Futures

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Prologue

Not so long ago, it was common to hear dire pronouncements about the imminent demise of musical tonality. The musical citizens who made those prognostications—composers, performers, critics, and academics alike—would often point to a period around the turn of the nineteenth century as the time that the venerable lineage of tonal music in the West slowly but surely began devolving into a radically different and unrecognizable language of atonality. Harmonic tonality, it seemed, was a historically contingent language whose time was passing. For some, this was cause for celebration, or at least a resigned acceptance of the reality and necessity of musical change. We might well nominate Anton Webern as a spokesperson for this group when he famously declared in a public lecture from 1933 that tonality was in its last throes and for all practical purposes dead for any serious composer.¹ It was a sentiment that continued to be voiced over the following decades. As late as 1979, the composer Charles Wuorinen sniffed that while the tonal system, in an atrophied or vestigial form, is still used today in popular and commercial music, and even occasionally in the works of backward-looking serious composers, it is no longer employed by serious composers of the mainstream. It has been replaced or succeeded by the 12-tone system.²

For others, though, the waning of harmonic tonality portended a profound cultural loss in musical communication and meaning. No one expressed this sentiment more poignantly than Leonard Bernstein, who in his final Norton Lecture, delivered at Harvard University in 1973, elegized tonality as a natural, universal language of music in whose revitalization lay the only hope of music regaining its potential for real emotional affect. The errant path toward atonality and serialism followed by the academic composers after Schoenberg (and later the serial Stravinsky) were like the children of Hamelin following their Pied Piper, right into the Schoenbergian sea.³

Of course it all proved a false alarm. Tonality did not perish in the twentieth century. It turned out, on the contrary, to be surprisingly resilient. Many composers continued to write in idioms that were heard as largely tonal in orientation (sometimes dubbed neotonal or the new tonality—vestigial in the words of Wuorinen).⁴ And the expected onslaught of serialism never materialized. Bernstein foresaw almost as much when he declared in that same 1973 lecture that serialism might someday be viewed as an evolutionary mutation in the history of Western music. When we now turn on our radios or iPods, go to the movies, attend a concert, or walk into a restaurant, the sounds of tonal music still fill our ears.

What is more, in these very same media and venues we can hear music of popular genres from around the world that seem also to be infiltrated by the familiar diatonic melodies, rhythms, and chordal patterns of Western tonal music even if it is often blended with indigenous performance practices. Tonality in the early twenty-first century seems to act like a resistant virile bacterium that evolves into ever-differing strains, infecting countless world idioms from Asian K-pop to African hymnody, from Bollywood film scores to iPhone ring tones.

Of course all this begs the question of just what we mean by tonality. One need not be a professional music theorist to recognize that the tonal language of a composer such as Phillip Glass or Oswaldo Golijov is hardly the same as what one hears in a quartet by Mozart or a symphony of Rachmaninoff (not to mention in those K-pop songs or Bollywood film scores). Then again, it is not that idioms of nontonal music don’t exist. A good deal of contemporary art music would be difficult to accommodate by even the most generously capacious definition of tonality; and there are still many types of world music that seem to have resisted colonization by Western tonality. Still, for a language that has more than once been read its obituary, tonality—however defined—seems to have lived on in quite good health, thank you very much. It is no wonder, then, that among the community of academic music theorists at the beginning of the twenty-first century, there seems to be a new fluorescence of interest in theories of tonality.⁵

But the twentieth century was not the only time when musicians worried greatly about the nature and health of tonality. We need only look back to the middle of the nineteenth century to find some surprisingly similar anxieties expressed by musicians. Indeed, from the moment the notion was first theorized by the Belgian musicologist François-Joseph Fétis (1784–1871), tonality—tonalité—began to generate heated debate among musicians, particularly in Francophone Europe.

Obviously, nineteenth-century worries about tonality were not caused by the specter of atonality. Tonalité was first invoked not in relation to what followed it but rather what preceded it. In this case, it was the modal practice of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, whose musics were just then beginning to be transcribed, reanimated, and studied in greater detail. This music also was considered by Fétis to have a special kind of tonality, which he called tonalité ancienne. But it was a historical tonality that had been superseded by tonalité moderne, creating a crisis among composers (in Fétis’s telling of the story) no less dramatic and wrenching than the more familiar passion play from the twentieth century.

The concept of tonality was used by Fétis, then, as a marker of difference. And there were no lack of musical practices that could be usefully differentiated by it. Besides tonalities distanced by age, there were also differing tonalities separated by place. As nineteenth-century Europeans were learning more and more about music from afar, awareness grew that musical tonalities were not the same over the face of the earth, whether from the Levant and Far East, or from Africa and the South Pacific. But there were even differing tonalities in our own backyard. As some ears turned to the picturesque folk music that could still be heard in the provinces, it was becoming clear that French musical dialects were hardly uniform in nature. And then there were more anxiety-provoking tonalities, many of which came from the pen of an opera composer active across the Rhine: dissonant chromaticism and vertiginous modulations that seemed to challenge expectations of normative tonal behavior. All this suggests that tonality is a theoretical construct born of alterity and anxiety.

These are some of the rich stories that I want to tell in this book. The main actor in most of these tales—perhaps I should say, the main impresario—will be Fétis, whose voice and work dominated French musical scholarship in the nineteenth century like no other. As a respected professor of composition and counterpoint in the Paris Conservatory (and after 1833 as head of the newly founded Brussels Conservatory), as a prolific critic and pundit whose professional career spanned more than half a century, and above all as one of the most learned and widely published scholars of music history and theory, Fétis wielded unprecedented influence in the musical world of nineteenth-century Europe. And nowhere was this influence more in evidence than with his theory of musical tonalité. But his was by no means the only voice. Many others—scholars, composers, critics, and listeners—joined in the debates concerning tonality, sometimes in unison with Fétis and just as often per motum contrarium. The breadth of these conversations was impressive. We find the concept of tonality invoked by editors dealing with the restoration of Gregorian chant or transcribing medieval polyphony; we will see the notion invoked by collectors of folk music, by travelers recording their impressions of Arabic incantations or Chinese court music, by scholars attempting to imagine the earliest music of the Greeks or Egyptians, and by critics attempting to explain the music of Tristan and Carmen. It was even a concept in the mind of many composers who wrote their music self-consciously attempting to emulate—or perhaps steer clear of—certain kinds of tonality. In short, tonalité was black matter in the French musical universe; maybe it was not always seen, but its presence could be everywhere felt. And the writer who was most responsible for first theorizing this mysterious historical force and bringing it to the attention of a whole continent was Fétis. With indefatigable energy, he produced voluminous writings on every aspect of the theory and history of tonality that still astound by their ambitious scope and audacious originality.

To be sure, our Belgian critic was not without his faults. Arrogant and irascible by nature, Fétis could be careless in his research, overreaching in his claims, and intolerant of criticism. Succumbing all too readily to the esprit du système, he was quick to seize on any evidence he could find so long as it seemed to confirm his theories and conversely to overlook or explain away any conflicting evidence. (In other words, I might add with a wink, he would be immediately recognized as a familiar figure in academia today.) Then there is the crass orientalism we can find running through his writings on world music, the acidic racism that is expressed in his late writings. Of course we know sadly that this was hardly unique for a European scholar active in the mid-nineteenth century. But it still can make us cringe today.

It is not my intention in this book to paper over the faults and prejudices of Fétis for the sake of hagiography. And over the course of my study, I will have many occasions to pause and consider the soundness of his arguments. But let me also be clear: I will not try to correct every mistake with the right answer based on current research, to adjudicate every polemic in which he engaged, still less to apologize for every obtuse comment and arrogant prejudice. I trust my readers will understand that we are many generations removed from the scholarly and speculative writings I will be looking at and that there is probably not a single one of Fétis’s major claims that could be presented today without serious qualifications if not actual correction. It is not the point of this book to provide these qualifications and corrections. While I will occasionally refer to contemporary research on certain issues when I think it might be illuminating to the argument at hand, my main intention is to present the ideas of Fétis and his contemporaries as clearly and sympathetically as I can.

Ultimately, I am curious to understand what it was about tonality that made it such an appealing, almost essential concept holding such urgency in Fétis’s day. Put another way, I want to know what the problems were that tonality seemed to address so effectively that it quickly ingrained itself within nineteenth-century musical discourse. Over the seven chapters of this study, we will hear from many voices. Fétis’s voice will be a constant; but a considerable number of other European writers responded to his ideas on tonality in differing ways (and with differing levels of enthusiasm). The stories I will try to tell are ones that largely took place in the French language, although a few German, English, and Italian writings will make occasional cameo appearances.

To unfold these multilevel stories, here is the plan I will follow. I begin in chapter 1 with a historical account of Fétis’s theory of tonality, tracing its roots in earlier theoretical and philosophical traditions. While there is an empirical scale-based element to his notion of tonality that is a legacy of the Italian partimento tradition, we will see that his theory ultimately represents a metaphysical conception of tonal relations that owes much to German idealist philosophers such as Kant and Hegel, whom we will see provided catalytic inspiration. Their idealism also furnished Fétis the grounding he needed to construct an ambitious universal history of tonality that encompassed all ages and cultures. In particular, we will look closely at the famous four orders of tonality by which Fétis reconstructed the evolutionary stages of Western musical tonality and dared thereby to predict its future.

In chapter 2 I will survey the first of several nineteenth-century areas of musicological research in which Fétis’s notion of tonality played itself out: the plainchant reform movement that so engaged French and Belgium clerics (long before, incidentally, the better-known work of the Solesmes monks after midcentury). Fétis’s reification of an original plainchant tonality provided the justification that many church authorities were seeking for purging chant practice of all pernicious influences that were regarded as the anachronistic intrusions of a later, tonal practice and return that repertoire to the unsullied, purified modality characteristic of tonalité ancienne. But there was hardly any consensus on the matter. The debates that ensued—from the use of accidentals in Roman chant to the kinds of organ accompaniments that should be sanctioned in church—were only the first of many polemics that Fétis’s writings would generate.

In chapter 3, I will pursue another topic of historical musicology: the apparent emergence of tonal markings in the music of the Middle Ages. Fétis was confident that the beginnings of modern tonality could be dated quite precisely to the beginning of the seventeenth century in the music of Monteverdi. But as other musicologists began to learn more about the music of the Middle Ages, suspicions arose that tonality might have had a much older pedigree than Fétis had allowed. (The question of musica ficta was a key point of contention, as the introduction of a chromatic semitone by singers within an otherwise pure diatonic fabric suggested to some editors the affective quality of leading tones, one of the key characteristics that Fétis attributed exclusively to modern tonality.) In addition, many of these same observers thought that much vernacular song from the Middle Ages, especially the music of the trouvères, was clearly tonal in orientation. Little by little, the clear demarcations Fétis laid out in his contiguous stages of tonal evolution were being breached.

Further complicating this story were the popular folk songs (the chansons populaires) that French collectors were beginning to transcribe and publish in various anthologies throughout the nineteenth century. In chapter 4, we will see how many of these songs, particularly those from the more remote provinces of France, seemed to be based on differing scale systems, some of which suggested modal origins that could be traced to the Middle Ages or perhaps even earlier to the Greeks. But the picture was not clear. Some of the oldest of the popular songs sounded to many ears as if they were in simple major or minor keys. That evidence suggested that tonality might have roots in vernacular traditions despite the insistence of a number of church musicians that the modality of the church was really the authentic language of the people. Tonality was becoming politicized.

In chapter 5, I will widen our view to look at tonalities outside of Europe. The various scale systems of Arabic and Indian music that European scholars were discovering in the nineteenth century, with all their microtones and unusual interval structures, were proof enough to Fétis that tonalities varied widely across the globe and that each was particular to the needs and character of the race that embraced it. As Fétis studied many of these musical traditions more closely, he began to wonder whether the origins of these various tonalities might be the same as those of the Indo-European language family whose genealogies were being reconstructed by contemporaneous linguists. At the same time, though, Fétis fell under the sway of some of the more invidious racial theories that French ethnologists were beginning to promote. He concluded in some of his very last writings that biology and race must have played a more determinant role in the evolution of tonality than he had earlier thought. This led, then, to animated debates among many theorists about the historical filiations of tonalities across cultures and how they might have been transformed and changed over time.

In chapter 6, I will revisit some of Fétis’s theoretical arguments and subject them to closer scrutiny. In particular, I will examine Fétis’s criticisms of his theoretical predecessors and try to understand why he felt that their many attempts to find a scientific basis for the theory and practice of music in mathematics or acoustics must inevitably fail. The French, we must recall, had inherited in the theory of Rameau perhaps the single most ambitious attempt to naturalize tonal harmony. If Fétis concluded that Rameau’s efforts (not to mention those of almost all of his theoretical successors) to ground tonality in natural laws of empirical science were ultimately chimerical, other investigators were not willing to give up the dream so easily. Many of them continued in their efforts to find a universal theory of tonal music. This is a rich and extensive literature that is little known today, overshadowed as it is by so much German theorizing. But as we will see, this literature, too, was itself in almost constant dialogue and contestation with Fétis’s influential work.

Finally, in chapter 7 I will turn to the future of music. Fétis famously designated some of the most advanced music of his day as omnitonique, and he predicted that the rapid and often chromatically elaborated modulations to remote key areas characteristic of this order would continue to increase in number and intensity. Though it is not quite right to say that Fétis anticipated the death spiral of tonality that Schoenberg supposedly finalized, there is no doubt that he did see tonality careening into an uncertain and unhappy future. Anxiety about the future of musical tonality was also on the minds of many French composers, and some of them were well aware of Fétis’s writings and those of his critics. But by then, the notion had long seeped out of the scholarly literature and become part of common musical parlance (as today). As French composers worried about their own national identity and musical patrimony—especially with the specter of Wagner looming from across the Rhine—the question of musical tonality assumed renewed urgency. For some, this meant keeping up with the most modern tonal practice then being exported by Wagner and his devotees; for others it was just the opposite: they retreated into an older modal language that was imagined to be part of the musical patrimony of France’s glorious past (unitonique music, as Fétis called it). Still others went in a differing direction altogether and experimented with exotic oriental topoi and scale systems. Tonalité seemed to be a persistent riptide in the volatile maelstrom of French musical culture in the nineteenth century.

· · ·

Let me finally say a word about my invocation of stories in the title of my book. I use the term quite deliberately, not only to designate some of Fétis’s own writings but also the many episodes and encounters described in the individual chapters. Thus, I hope to be a teller of stories in this book, or perhaps more accurately, a reteller of stories. For each of the many individuals we will be hearing from in this book—Fétis above all—have tales to tell. By this I obviously do not mean to say that all the arguments and evidence offered by Fétis and his contemporaries are mere fictions (although many musicologists today might surely—and perhaps rightly—deem some of them to be just that). The more important point I wish to draw out is that tonality can best be understood not just as an object to be described and analyzed but also as a historical subject that emerges most vividly from storytelling.

Hayden White has argued that many French historians of the nineteenth century favored specific discursive modes and rhetorical tropes in order to create their vivid historical narratives.⁶ In this way, then, history became essentially an art of storytelling. (The French word histoire, we might recall, can mean both a history as well as a story.) But it was hardly something for which White faulted them. On the contrary, he argued that only through the medium of the story can real meaning and interpretation arise out of a mere sequence of events.

I have tried to employ a style of narrative in my book that underscores this notion of history as story by giving voice to the many individuals whose writings I cover. (I hope and trust readers will not mistake this envoicement as my own uncritical acceptance of their arguments.) As Brian Hyer reminds us, tonality is one of the great myths of Western music, and Fétis one of its greatest mythmakers.⁷ And as with all great myths, generations of rapt listeners have found in the subject something profoundly important, something profoundly true, and thus something that needs to be told and retold anew even as the details of its story change with each teller. The stakes for many of these stories about tonality, as we will learn, were surprisingly high—just as they are in our own day. So as we continue to engage a musical language whose own physiognomy has become ever more blurred through digital iteration and global amplification, it may be instructive (and perhaps even consoling) for us today to hear from the first generation of bards who sang tales of tonality’s adventures. They are stories that remain unfinished still.

Chapter One

Tonal Imaginations

The excitement was palpable. In the fashionable concert salon of Herz just off the rue de la Victoire, an audience of the elite of Parisian musical society comprising some seven hundred spectators gathered on a cold, overcast winter afternoon in 1844—February 18, at 2:00 p.m., to be precise. The leading music critics and journalists had taken the front seats. But there were also large numbers of faculty and students from the Conservatoire to be seen in the audience as well as members of the Institut and Académie. Scattered in the rear rows were a smattering of Jesuit and Benedictine monks, conspicuous in their black cassocks among the well-dressed intelligentsia. A number of well-known musicians and salon artists could also be spotted in the room. Even Franz Liszt, it was whispered, had snuck in through a back door to take a seat.

And what kind of concert brought this large, motley group together? What famous musician had they come to see perform on that cold afternoon? Why, it was no concert at all. Instead, they had all gathered to hear a lecture—a lecture, of all things, on the history and theory of harmony. One might ask why this erudite topic could have been of so much interest to so many. But then again, no ordinary lecturer was speaking that afternoon. For they had all come to hear François-Joseph Fétis (1784–1871), the famed Belgian musicologist who had long gained a formidable reputation in Paris as a learned historian and theorist of music, conservatory professor, composer, critic, conductor, biographer, and indefatigable essayist.

Fétis knew how to pack the hall. In a series of promotional notices in the Revue et gazette musicale, he promised that this cours gratuit would be no ordinary recitation of technical theory or dry historical facts.¹ Rather, Fétis promised something far more profound, far more astonishing for the use of all artists and amateurs of music. He would disclose to his listeners nothing less than the single universal principle of music, one that could explain the complete nature and history of music, sweeping away in one stroke the rubbish of erroneous theory that had accumulated over time. It was a principle that would explain the affective power of music, why it was that certain kinds of music could move us so deeply (and other kinds could not); it was also a principle that could be seen to have guided the development of music from its earliest ages and one that could also explain the diversities of music we can hear among differing cultures and peoples. Indeed, so powerful was this principle that it even promised to predict the next stages into which music would develop.

And what was this encompassing principle, this universal law, this all-powerful creative force? It was none other than that of tonalité. In the epic story Fétis related to his audience, tonality assumed the Promethean role as the guiding loadstar of musical development in all its historical and theoretical facets. It is this principle that was the subject of his four lectures during those two weeks—and we might also say, in most of the many writings he produced over his rich and productive eighty-seven years of life.² Rarely before had any musicologist proposed a theory of music that was so grandiose in its scope, so audacious in its claims, so self-confident in its predictive power.³ Could Fétis possibly meet the great burden he placed on this one idea?

CHORON AND THE CONCEPT OF TONALITÉ

But first things first. Fétis, we should note, did not coin the locution tonalité. That honor seems to belong to his former mentor and friend, Alexandre-Étienne Choron (1771–1834).⁴ Although trained as a mathematician, Choron harbored a lifelong passion for music, particularly the sacred Italian choral repertoire of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As a youth, he read widely in the fields of music history and theory. Subsequent study with the Abbé Bonesi exposed him to the Italian partimento pedagogy of Francesco Durante and Nicola Sala. These studies eventually led him in 1804 to coauthor (along with Vincenzo Fiocchi) the Principes d’accompagnement des écoles d’Italie and four years later a much expanded, multivolume treatise, the Principes de composition des écoles d’Italie. While a good deal of this latter work consists of harmonic and counterpoint pedagogy drawn from Sala, Friedrich Wilhelm Marpurg, Padre Martini, and Galeazzo Sabbatini, it is also noteworthy as one of the greatest repositories of printed Italian Renaissance polyphony hitherto gathered within a single luxurious publication.

During this period, Choron also published a summary of the history of music, one part of which consisted of a Historical Dictionary of the most eminent musicians, artists and amateurs, dead or alive that he coauthored with François Fayolle.⁵ While much of his sommaire was drawn from earlier publications by Burney, Hawkins, and Forkel, there was also much new, as we will shortly see. Choron’s history was the first serious attempt by a French scholar to write a history of music in which changing tonal systems were seen as integral to the development of music.

Choron was an ardent advocate for the reform of church music, which was, he repeatedly lamented, in desperate shape. He was particularly alarmed about Gregorian chant, which was virtually unrecognizable in its current, distressing state.⁶ In order to understand where recent practice had gone astray, he began to study older treatises and manuscripts of medieval chant. In 1811, he accepted appointment as the Director of Music of Religious Ceremonies by Napoléon, one charge of which was to help revive the practice of chant in French churches.⁷

One final chapter in Choron’s busy career should be noted. After a short and unhappy stint as régisseur-général of the opera house (officially the Académie royale de musique), Choron founded in 1820 a choral school for young singers through which he could devote himself to the study and performance of his beloved Italian repertory of early vocal music. Granted support by the recently crowned Bourbon king, Louis XVIII, Choron’s school was renamed the Institution royale de musique classique et religieuse in 1825. As part of his charge, Choron directed a series of musical performances (or exercises) with his singers in which the classical sacred works of Italian polyphony could be heard in public.⁸ While the Institution collapsed shortly after the 1830 revolution, during the Restoration it played a major role in bringing to the public’s attention a range of early choral music and setting a pattern of historical music concerts that would be emulated by Fétis. (Choron’s school was resurrected, incidentally, at midcentury by Louis Niedermeyer, and it became one of the most influential schools of sacred music in the second half of the nineteenth century. We’ll hear more about the École Niedermeyer in the next chapter.) For now, though, it suffices to note that Choron’s musical activities in the first three decades of the century were dominated by his study, teaching, editing, and performance of early music.

Based on his deep immersion in historical sacred chant and Renaissance polyphony, Choron soon began to sense how different the tonal language of this early music was from that of contemporary music, and he attempted to describe these differences more concretely.⁹ The older style of music is most clearly to be heard in the ecclesiastical modes of the early church, modes that he thought were rooted in the music and theory of the ancient Greeks. Choron called this tonalité antique. It differed from the tonalité moderne or tonalité vulgaire of the present day, which relies on a system of keys and harmonies that was unknown within the earlier tonal system.¹⁰

Choron realized that one of the most important features of modern tonality was its use of the leading tone (note sensible) combined with the fourth scale degree. The resulting tritone or diminished fifth helped to define the tonic center of each key and was what gave the dominant seventh chord its unique key-defining quality. The notes of the tritone, Choron wrote, "seem in effect to summon [appeller] the notes toward which they tend to resolve. This is why they are called ‘appellative’ notes."¹¹ But it was quite the opposite in the ancient tonality, where no such appellative urges were registered. This was hardly surprising given that the interval of a tritone was strictly proscribed by theorists of the time.

Choron also thought he knew where the historical boundary lay between these two systems. It was at the end of the sixteenth century, when modern tonality was beginning to be sensed most strongly and to exercise its influence in composition.¹² Just as Fétis eventually would, Choron credited Monteverdi to whom of all the great masters . . . modern tonality and harmony owe their greatest debt with this discovery.¹³ But if Monteverdi was the instigator of this new tonality, it was the great Neapolitan maestro Francesco Durante who, more than a century later, was the one to finally perfect modern tonality in the form we know it today.¹⁴

These insights helped Choron realize what the challenge was in any restoration of chant. Chant practice had been almost completely corrupted over the centuries by the encroachment of modern tonality. Specifically, it was the mixture of modern major and minor scales (modes modernes) with the scales of the ecclesiastical modes (modes primordiaux) by contemporary church musicians that had caused chant to degenerate to such a lamentable state. Each constituted a differing system that needed to be kept separate.

But there was more. Choron suggested that other people outside of Europe possessed their own musical idioms or languages based on varying scalar systems.

One can imagine the possibility of a great number of different modes by which one could form various systems. Each of these systems of modes will essentially constitute those idioms or languages of music that belong to different races of men. Thus, the peoples of the Levant seem to have a modality completely different from ours that . . . is not well understood to this day. We have shown, or at least indicated, what the tonality of the Greeks consisted of and that from it was derived ecclesiastical tonality. As for our [tonality], it contains only two modes.¹⁵

It was a remarkable insight that would greatly inspire Fétis. Each race of people might have their own system of modes or scales, their own special tonalité.¹⁶

Choron’s concept of tonality (one could not justify calling it a theory yet) remained undeveloped in his publications. Still, it was suggestive enough that the term was quickly picked up by a number of subsequent French theorists through the end of the Restoration, including Castil-Blaze (1820), Gréogoire Orloff (1822), Philippe Geslin (1825), Henri Berton (1829), and Daniel Jelensperger (1830), all who used it to describe elements of the modern major and minor scale system in their practical treatises of harmony.¹⁷ But it was Fétis who seemed to grasp most clearly the potential of this idea for an ambitious reconceptualization of music history.

Fétis would have first gotten to know Choron’s writings and perhaps the man himself soon after he left his native city of Mons (in present-day Belgium) for Paris, where our seventeen-year-old student enrolled in the newly reconstituted Conservatoire in 1800 (August 31 to be precise, the ninth day of Brumaire in year IX). In any case, at some point Fétis and Choron became close friends and confidants, a friendship that they would maintain until Choron’s passing in 1834.¹⁸

Yet Choron’s own contribution to Fétis’s project was more substantial than even this cursory overview suggests. For one thing, much in Fétis’s own pedagogy of harmony can be directly traced to Choron’s own, earlier formulations. (We will briefly look at some of these filiations later in this chapter, and in more depth in chapter 6.) But there is even more to this story, for it turns out that there are a substantial number of lengthy manuscripts in Choron’s hand in the Bibliothèque nationale that were never published but show a remarkable development of his theoretical ideas of tonalité through the 1820s. The German musicologist Nathalie Meidhof has recently published a study of these texts and found that Choron seemed to be sketching out a fuller theoretical and historical theory of tonality that anticipates in many striking ways many of the notions that we would later attribute to Fétis. For example, Choron seemed particularly focused on refining the concept of appellative tones, even speaking of the tritone as an appellative consonance, as Fétis soon would.¹⁹ He also continued to study ancient Greek music theory in an attempt to distinguish a tonalité antique and its difference from—and eventual evolution into—a tonalité ecclésiastique (Meidhof, 249). Meidhof sees these manuscripts as the missing link between Choron’s earlier and somewhat cryptic pronouncements about tonality and Fétis’s mature theory of tonality as he began to develop it in the 1830s (246). She plausibly hypothesizes that the subject of tonalité must have been a regular topic of conversation between the two men during this time. She concludes from this that the paternity for the concept of tonality should be shared between Choron and Fétis as the result of their hitherto unrecorded collaboration (260).

There is much to be said for Meidhof’s supposition. In a fulsome entry on Choron that Fétis published in 1837 in the third volume of his ambitious biographical dictionary, Fétis freely admitted that he had read many of Choron’s unpublished writings that Choron had showed him. Fétis does not tell us exactly what was in these writings except to say that they are full of new ideas and profound principles and introduce many new ideas in the theory of [music] such that their publication would no doubt place Choron among the ranks of the most distinguished men in the literature and history of music (BU¹, 3:134). Alas, Fétis continues, Choron’s own energy and confidence in his ideas flagged. Despite Fétis’s continual encouragement to develop and publish them, Choron left his manuscript texts in a box, never to be completed.

Meidhof suggests one plausible reason Choron may have felt uninspired to refine and publish his work. Perhaps he recognized in his younger colleague a more energetic and capable music theorist who could do a better job of it himself (Meidhof, 260). But it also might be that in the course of their conversations, Fétis was forming some of his own ideas that went far beyond what his esteemed mentor might have been thinking. As we will see, when Fétis finally started to publish his own thoughts regarding tonality, the concept would take on a wholly new dimension. But even then, it would take some time to work out its full implications.

FÉTIS AND THE METAPHYSICS OF TONALITY

It is easy for us to see in retrospect why Fétis would have been initially so drawn to Choron’s concept of tonalité. And here some background will be helpful. From his earliest memories as a child, Fétis claimed to have been drawn to music, a subject for which he showed unusual talent.²⁰ He began taking organ lessons from his father (who was also a professional musician) while also making some efforts at composition. As a conservatory student in Paris, Fétis followed a strict regime of piano and composition lessons, attaining some success in the latter by winning second prize in a competition in 1807. But it was music theory and history that increasingly drew his curiosity and energies. Under the tutelage of the esteemed M. Rey, he began to study Rameau’s theory of the fundamental bass, though he quickly became skeptical about the latter’s reliance on acoustics to ground his theory.²¹ Catel’s theory of harmony, which was adopted by the Conservatoire in 1802, was a slight improvement, in Fétis’s eyes, but it still struck him as deficient because of its unsystematic empiricism. Soon our young student was on a quest to find the true principle of harmony.

In his own entry for the Biographie universelle, Fétis boasted that he began reading all the music-theory texts he could find as a student, searching for a truly convincing explanation of harmony (BU¹, 4:103–15). At the same time, he began reading widely into the history of music. It helped that early on he showed a propensity for learning foreign languages, allowing him to read outside of the French literature. He must have made real progress, for by 1806, so he tells us, the publishing firm Ballard had already gained enough confidence in the precocious twenty-two-year-old to commission him to edit a new edition of plain chant (BU¹, 4:105).

Choron was an obvious model for Fétis to emulate, then, given the former’s activities in questions both theoretical and historical. The whole spectrum of Choron’s many musical projects in music theory and history—including the restoration of chant, the reform of music education, the editing and performance of early music, and the writing of treatises of harmony and counterpoint in addition to historical biographies—seems to have served as a template for Fétis’s own career ambitions. And there was no greater legacy than in Choron’s pregnant notion of tonality. Before we look at Fétis’s own take on this idea in closer detail, though, a few more biographical notes are in order.

Fétis married Adélaïde Louise Catherine Robert in 1806, who was all of fourteen years old at the time and came from a well-connected family of noblemen and merchants under the ancien régime. But the family fortune took an unfortunate downturn in 1811, forcing Fétis and his wife to move to the northeast of France for several years, where he gained meager employment as an organist and music tutor in the small town of Douai (BU¹, 4:106). He was finally able to return to Paris in the summer of 1818. He spent the next three years trying his luck as a composer in the operatic marketplace, even achieving some moderate success in staging two of them. (Of course it was hard for any composer in Paris during this period to compete with the popularity of Rossini.) Finally, in 1821 his fortune took a turn for the better. He gained a coveted position in the Conservatoire as a professor of composition and counterpoint, where his colleagues included Catel, Cherubini, Berton, Reicha, and Boieldieu. But it would quickly become clear that our young music professor was not going to be content remaining a simple pedagogue no matter how prestigious the post. He now saw his new professional position as an ideal launching pad for a scholarly career. And no topic would more preoccupy him over these years than that of tonalité.

Fétis’s own ideas, however, took some time to mature. In the earliest publications, one would not guess the important role tonality would eventually play in his thought. In his very first entrée into the print market—a short manual on harmony and accompaniment that he brought out in 1823—he does not even use the term.²² While Fétis made some grand claims regarding the originality and pedagogical efficacy of his harmony method (all boilerplate boasting that one could find prefacing just about any similar treatise of the time), there was actually not much that was new in it. Most of the theoretical ideas presented in his Méthode were drawn from other writers. This might not be entirely surprising; as a new convert to Victor Cousin’s doctrine of eclecticism, Fétis would have thought it absurd not to use the best ideas from his predecessors. Still, he never let on that so much of his theory was borrowed. But for sophisticated readers who might know some of this earlier theory, there is a shock of recognition on virtually every page.

Fétis began with a basic premise of the Italian partimento school (particularly the teachings of Durante and Sala as conveyed by Choron) concerning the primacy of the diatonic scale and the natural harmonies built above it. Among these harmonies, Fétis taught that there are just two principal harmonies of the modern key system—the consonant tonic triad and the dissonant dominant seventh chord, both of which may be inverted. (This was a key element of Rameau’s theory of harmony.) All other chords can be derived through various modifications of these harmonies by means of substitution and prolongation. Fétis defines substitution as the replacement of the fifth scale degree by the sixth scale degree in the dominant seventh chord, thus producing varieties of half- and fully diminished seventh leading-tone chords as well as dominant ninth chords. (Fétis claims that this was his own discovery, though it is found in Rameau and is also prominent in the theories of Bethizy, Berton, and Choron [BU¹, 4:107].) Prolongation, however, is simply an elaboration of triads and seventh chords through the suspension of one or more of their chord tones. (This is a major feature of partimento pedagogy as well as the harmony treatises of Catel and Choron.) Fétis goes on to illustrate how these two kinds of chord modifications can be combined and elaborated with other techniques of harmonic embellishment.²³ After a short consideration of modulation, pedal points, and an example of the règle de l’octave, Fétis concludes with an appendix of forty-two partimenti drawn from various Neapolitan masters including Durante, Sala, and Fenaroli. These exercises take up fully half of the publication. (I will return for a more thorough consideration of Fétis’s theory of harmony and its indebtedness to the Italian partimento tradition in chapter 6.)

For now, we might simply note that there is not much new to be seen in this modest manual of harmony and accompaniment. As I have indicated, most of the ideas he introduces can be found in earlier theoretical or practical writings. But there was indeed something new he boasted