It has been said that the feeling of tonality is a motor image
or "form-quality" and that the image of the tonic persists
throughout every sequence of tones in a melody. Now these are
not only felt as having a certain relation to the tonic; that
relation is an active one. It was said that we had a positive
desire to end on a certain tone, and that a tendency to pass
to that tone was bound up with the hearing of another tone.
The degree of this tendency is determined by their relation.
The key, the tonality, is determined by the consensus of
intervals which have been felt as more or less consonant.
Then steps in this scale which come near to the great salient
points--that is, the points of greatest consonance, which is
unity, which is rest--are felt as suggesting them. This is
the reason why a semitone progression is felt as so compelling.
In taking the scale upward, C to C', that element in the tone-
Space already clearly foreshadowed by the previous tones is C';
B is so near that it is almost C'--it seems to cry aloud to be
completed by C'. Then the tendency to move from B to C' is
especially strong. In the same way a chromatic note suggests
most strongly the salient point in the scheme to which it is
nearest--and "tends" to it as to a point of comparative rest.
The difference between the major and minor scales may be found
in the lesser definiteness<1> with which the tendency to
progression, in the latter, is felt--"a condition of hovering,
a kind of ambiguity, of doubt, to which side the movement
shall proceed." We may then understand a melody as ever tending
with various degrees of urgency, of strain, to its centre of
gravity, the tonic.
<1> F. Weinmann, _Zeitschr. f. Psychol._, Bd. 35, p. 360.
It is from this point of view that we can see the cogency of
Gurney's remark, that when music seems to be yearning for
unutterable things, it is really yearning only for the next
note. "In this step from the state of rest into movement and
return, the coming again to rest; on what circuitous ways,
with what reluctances and hesitations; whether quick and
decisively or gradually and unnoticed--therein consists the
nature of melody."<1>
<1> Weinmann, op. cit.
Or in Gurney's more eloquent description, "The melody may begin
by pressing its way through a sweetly yielding resistance to a
gradually foreseen climax; whence again fresh expectation is
bred, perhaps for another excursion, as it were, round the same
centre but with a bolder and freer sweep,...to a point where
again the motive is suspended on another temporary goal; till
after a certain number of such involutions and evolutions, and
of delicately poised leanings and reluctances and yieldings,
the forces so accurately measured just suffice to bring it home,
and the sense of potential and coming integration which has
underlain all our provisional adjustments of expectation is
triumphantly justified."<1>
<1> Op. cit., p. 165.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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