Tonality re-framed: The tone clock as gateway to expanded tonality

Abstract

During the 20ᵗʰ century, developments in musical practice courted controversy by abandoning traditional means of musical organization and expression. A potent response to this trend was the work of Peter Schat in creating the tone clock theory of musical composition, and Jenny McLeod’s efforts to develop these ideas in the New Zealand context. However, Schat’s claim to have created an ‘atonical tonality’ is problematic. This thesis uses the tone clock as a tool for generating an expanded form of true tonality. Based upon the common branching groupings of both tonal framing and tone clock steering, the two approaches are combined to create an expanded tonality of emancipated intervals, allowing the population of an expanded musical territory with the expressive possibilities tonality is already known to possess through the work of earlier composers and theorists. The approach, developed using small experiments in composition and analysis, is that the groupings which emerge from the small number of tonal framing motions are easily described by a steering tree, which relates them to the principles of the tone clock. This allows the same basic tonal framings to be transposed into a greater number of interval combinations. This expanded tonality is also demonstrated in multi-voice textures, making use of unconventional chordal sonorities channeled according to the same framing principles.