Analyzing Harmonic Polarities: A Tonal Narrative Approach

Analyzing the harmony and form of musical compositions remains a valuable tool for students of music, performers, composers, and musicologists. Yet many traditional approaches tend to focus on how complex features can be reduced into simpler categories and questions of unity and coherence. This book advocates an alternative tonal narrative approach, which uses a framework of polarities in dynamic interaction and interdependence to elucidate the life forces animating tonal compositions. Drawing on the writings of Arnold Schoenberg, Donald Francis Tovey, Charles Rosen, and others, the approach identifies three sets of polarities—centrifugal/centripetal, sharp/flat, and spatial/temporal—that interact in works by composers such as Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert. The approach suggests the methods by which the reader may delve into these polarities and thereby deeper into the meaning of masterworks. It proposes several tonal narrative functions, including intensifications to culminations and counterbalancing leading to completeness of harmonic space, which aim at helping the interpreter perceive the overall shape and narrative dynamics of a work.