The System of Order of Tones

Tonalities
of Peoples

The Life Atmosphere
of the Melody

The Origin
of Tonality

The Artistic Structuring of
the Tonality

Feelings, Mental Impressions and Moods through Tonalities

The Limits
of Recognizing
the Tonality

Training the Mental Power of Discrimination

Tonality

Tonality is the system of order of tones, that distinctive order of sounds, in which a motif unfolds towards a melody. There are orders of tonality of very different dimensions.

In the music history of different peoples we find completely different tonalities which today are erroneously presented as scales, even though they are termed "tonality."

Originally, tonality is the manifestation of the principle of innertonal structuring of the musical sound-space. While the motif unfolds into completely different melodies, into very differently structured musical patterns, each melody simultaneously upholds its own tonality as its very own sphere of life. This gives the melody inner and outer security during its creative unfoldment.

The origin of the tonality lies in the melody-technique, just as the origin of the melody-technique lies in the tonality. The influence of the tonality radiates into the world of the musical sound-space and creates its "atmosphere."

Tonality reveals itself in the artistic mastery of the overtones in a tone: in the lively and confident use of that natural, physical, inner structure of a tone which due to the present, incorrect way of reading scores has completely fallen into oblivion.

The overtone-spectrum may be produced and perceived in very different ways, and depending on the arrangement of the overtones, on their tonality, it evokes very different feelings, moods, and mental impressions within us listeners. Since an overtone-spectrum, due to its nature, contains an infinite number of diverse tones which appear as individual overtones, their different combinations result in an endless variety of musical sound-space structures – an infinite diversity of tonalities.

The conscious perception of overtones in our inner sense of hearing depends on the refinement of our hearing ability. The further away the overtones are from the basic tone, the finer is their structure, the fainter the sound, and hence the more difficult they are to hear. Also, they are much closer together, and thus much more difficult to differentiate.

Thus, while listening inside, one will eventually reach a limit where one can no longer discriminate the pitch of two neighbouring overtones; a limit where one's mental ability to differentiate, one's intellectual ability to discriminate – with regard to the tone – are no longer efficient, and all further overtones will at best be perceived as noise.

With the systematic training of the mental power of discrimination the musician or the listener penetrates, with his inner ear, deeper and deeper into the nature-given world of musical sound-spaces, and on the level of his feeling, depending on the refinement of his perception, he will hear and recognize the different tonalities in the innermost worlds of music: those manifold "planetary orbits of the musical sound-space."