Glossary

• atonal: (1) Music or other sounds without tones. (2) Confusingly but commonly (and somewhat disrespectfully), atonal can also refer to music that is atonical. See discussion of tonal.

• atonical: Music without a tonic.

• chromatic: (1) Relating to the complete scale of 12 tones available in euroclassical tonality. (2) Notes outside of the diatonic mode or scale upon which a composition is based.

• diatonic: (1) Conforming to a seven-note mode or scale which, when arranged in ascending order with the initial note repeated at the octave, contains intervals of two half steps (semitones) and five whole steps (whole tones). (2) Notes that are inside a diatonic mode, as opposed to chromatic notes which are outside the mode.

• diatonic mode: One of seven rotations of a diatonic scale, with each mode starting on a different degree of the scale and wrapping around to the beginning. Starting with the first degree of the major scale (the (1) Ionian mode), the other diatonic modes are (2) Dorian, (3) Phrygian, (4) Lydian, (5) Mixolydian, (6) Aeolian (the natural minor scale), and (7) Locrian. A mnemonic: “I Don’t Punch Like Mohammed A-Li”. See Chapter 18. Diatonic modes.

• fundamental pitch: The lowest frequency (or “partial”) of a sound wave (which also contains various “overtones” or “harmonics” at multiples above the fundamental frequency). See overtone series.

• interval: The difference in pitch between two tones.

• modal: (1) Music which has the characteristics of a mode. (2) Also commonly used to refer to music based on one of the 5 diatonic modes other than the Ionian (major) or Aeolian (minor).

• mode: A type of scale which results from distilling a tonal vocabulary down to a set of individual tones, normally arranged in ascending order and delimited by scale degree 1 (1̂, the tonic) at the bottom and top of one octave, coupled with a set of characteristic melodic and harmonic behaviors, motifs, and turns of phrase.

• non-tonical: Atonical. Music without a tonic.

• note: Any single, discrete sound of finite duration in music.

• note name: One of the first seven letters of the English alphabet (A-G) and any necessary accidental (flat or sharp) used to designate notes of a standard fundamental pitch (like A at 440 Hz).

• octave: The interval between one pitch and another with double its frequency. Notes separated by octaves have the same note name and pitch class. The octave relationship is a natural phenomenon that has been referred to as the “basic miracle of music,” the use of which is “common in most musical systems”, says Wikipedia.

• overtone series: aka “harmonic series”. A tone sung or played at a particular pitch consists of sound waves oscillating at a particular frequency (its fundamental pitch), and it also includes overtones or harmonics (aka partials) oscillating at integral multiples of the fundamental. The overtone series is the sequence of these overtones, expressed as intervals from the fundamental. The first five overtones in the series are: octave, perfect fifth, octave, major third, perfect fifth. Notice that the first three distinct pitches in the overtone series form a major triad chord, which helps explain why it is the most common chord in Western music. The fifth is the most common (or dominant) distinguishable overtone, which explains why the fifth degree of a major scale is called the “dominant”. How strongly which harmonics are present in a given tone is an essential aspect of timbre.

• pitch: The aspect of a sound determined by the rate of vibrations producing it—its acoustic frequency. Frequency is measured in Hertz (Hz).

• pitch class: A set of all pitches that are a whole number of octaves apart. For example, the pitch class C consists of all the Cs in all octaves.

• scale: An ordered collection of tones. Similar to a mode, but without mode’s implication of characteristic musical applications.

• semitone: The smallest interval in most Western music, and the smallest interval on a guitar fretboard, the distance across one fret on one string. On guitar, semitones are often referred to as “frets”. Sometimes they are also called “half steps”. In Western music, there are twelve semitones in an octave.

• timbre: (pronounced /ˈtambər/) aka “tone quality” or “tone color”. A complex acoustic phenomenon allowing us to distinguish between two notes, tonal or otherwise, sounded at the same pitch and volume.

• tonal: (1) any music which has the properties of a tone. (2) Confusingly, but commonly, “tonal” often refers to music that has a tonic. Philip Tagg makes a convincing argument that this usage, in addition to causing confusion by obscuring the fact that there are other ways of doing things, is chauvinist and biased against tonal idioms not used in the euroclassical or jazz canons (Tagg, 2018, pp. 52–55). Referring to most types of music in the world as “not tonal”, essentially, “not musical”, seems clearly a poor choice of words. Tagg suggests the term “tonical” instead of “tonal” for “music that has a tonic”, and using “tonal” for “any music which has the properties of a tone” (including contemporary classical music, which may be atonical but is not literally atonal). This book generally follows these terminology suggestions.

• tone: (1) A note with an easily discernible fundamental pitch. (2) An interval of two semitones, aka “whole tone” or “whole step”; a distance of two frets. (3) Purity of expression, timbre and articulation, as in “good tone” or “tone is in the fingers”.

• tonic: A noun meaning keynote or reference pitch. Its adjective is tonical (recommended) or tonal (in common usage).

• tonical: Music that has a tonic. Compare tonal.

Several of these definitions are taken nearly verbatim from the well-reasoned terminology choices in Philip Tagg’s Everyday Tonality II (towards a tonal theory of what most people hear) (2018), to which this book is indebted. Errors and omissions are, of course, my own.