Laughter and Tonality

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 this blatant 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 decided on the basis of that continuum mostly by paying attention my gut-level feelings. I had already discovered that I found working with tonal materials more fascinating than working with atonal materials (see Pleasurable Connections). But I also spent time considered the challenge of structuring tragicomic works from a practical standpoint.

I felt that the comic end of the spectrum was the more difficult challenge. Comedy is situational. Comedy depends on viewpoints, on expectations, on contexts that allow a comic perspective. And I personally found 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 flexible “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.