Laughter and Tonality

One can find truth in opera as long as it is fake enough (stylized enough) to allow us to draw a frame around it.—William Berger

I enjoy dramatic works that interweave comic and serious scenes, and I often work that way when I compose. In an early opera I tried moving from lighter to darker emotions by switching from tonal to atonal writing, but the results disappointed me. I felt the perceptual shift seemed too obvious, a bit like overacting. Instead, I wanted to make subtle shifts along a continuum that could encompass a wide spectrum of emotions.

I feel the comic end of the spectrum presents the greatest challenge. Comedy is situational. Comedy depends on viewpoints, on expectations, on contexts that allow a comic perspective. I personally find it hard to imagine composing comic music without the context (framework) provided by some form of tonality.

So to allow for comedy I’ve made a pliable, consonant, modal/tonal vocabulary the basis of my working spectrum. This provides a “norm” that can be altered for either comic or tragic effect. Comedy might involve unexpected turns, while darker emotions might involve more chromaticism, dissonance, or tonal ambiguity. (See also At-Oddness). Working within various “tonal” frameworks allows me to maintain a conceptual continuum, which in turn makes it easier to maintain a sense of continuity.

In my works this continuity seldom involves an over-arching tonal center. Instead, I usually treat “tonality” as a loosely-defined concept that allows immediate shifts of pitch center and mode. These passing modal/tonal frameworks provide situational, fragmentary contexts that I play with for comedic and dramatic purposes.