Mind, Body, World- Foundations of Cognitive Science, 2013a

The key feature from above is tonality, the use of particular musical keys to establish
an expected harmonic structure. “Harmony is Western music’s uniquely distinguishing
element” (Pleasants, 1955, p. 97). It was a reaction against this distinguishing
characteristic that led to what is known as modern music (Griffiths, 1994, 1995;
Ross, 2007). This section further explores the analogy between classical music and
cognitive science via parallels between modern music and embodied cognitive
science.
In the early twentieth century, classical music found itself in a crisis of harmony
(Pleasants, 1955). Composers began to abandon most of the characteristics of traditional
European classical music in an attempt to create a new music that better
reflected modern times. “‘Is it not our duty,’ [Debussy] asked, ‘to find a symphonic
means to express our time, one that evokes the progress, the daring and the victories
of modern days? The century of the aeroplane deserves its music’” (Griffiths, 1994,
p. 98).
Modern music is said to have begun with the Prélude à L’après-midi d’un faune
composed by Claude Debussy between 1892 and 1894 (Griffiths, 1994). The Prélude
breaks away from the harmonic relationships defined by strict tonality. It fails to
logically develop themes. It employs fluctuating tempos and irregular rhythms. It
depends critically on instrumentation for expression. Debussy “had little time for
the thorough, continuous, symphonic manner of the Austro-German tradition, the
‘logical’ development of ideas which gives music the effect of a narrative” (p. 9).
Debussy had opened the paths of modern music—the abandonment of traditional
tonality, the development of new rhythmic complexity, the recognition of color
as an essential, the creation of a quite new form for each work, the exploration of
deeper mental processes. (Griffiths, 1994, p. 12)
In the twentieth century, composers experimented with new methods that further
pursued these paths and exploited notions related to emergence, embodiment, and
stigmergy.
To begin, let us consider how modern music addressed the crisis of harmony by
composing deliberately atonal music. The possibility of atonality in music emerges
from the definition of musical tonality. In Western music there are 12 possible notes
available. If all of these notes are played in order from lowest to highest, with each
successive note a semitone higher than the last, the result is a chromatic scale.
Different kinds of scales are created by invoking constraints that prevent some
notes from being played, as addressed in the Chapter 4 discussion of jazz progressions.
A major scale is produced when a particular set of 7 notes is played, and the
remaining 5 notes are not played. Because a major scale does not include all of the
notes in a chromatic scale, it has a distinctive sound—its tonality. A composition
that had the tonal centre of A major only includes those notes that belong to the
A-major scale.
292 Chapter 6