Klangzentren und Tonalität - Musiktheorie / Musikanalyse ...

Fétis sees the omnitonic order as the ultimate stage in deriving more and more expression from
major/minor tonality. [...]
He sees the era as a degradation of music, allowing too great a resource for unbridled emotion
and passion, and one that could itself be superseded only by a new tonality. 40
Auch die Bedeutung der Harmonik für Fétis’ Tonalitätsbegriff wird in der Literatur
unterschiedlich bewertet. So schreibt Brian Hyer:
While both Choron and Fétis drew on the same basic theoretical resources, there are subtle but
crucial differences between their accounts of tonalité. In contrast to Choron, who emphasizes relations
between harmonies, Fétis places more stress on the order and position of pitches within a
scale. This difference in emphasis corresponds to the two main historical traditions of theoretical
conceptualization about tonal music: the function theories of Rameau and Riemann on the one
hand and the scale-degree theories of Gottfried Weber and Schenker on the other. 41
Der Behauptung, dass Fétis im Gegensatz zu Choron der skalaren Ordnung der Tonhöhen
mehr Bedeutung beigemessen hätte als der Harmonik, widerspricht dagegen
folgende Aussage von Bryan Simms:
Shirlaw credits Fetis with the statement that scales created harmony. Fetis, in fact, says just the
opposite. The fundamental relationship which generated modern tonality, he says, is the harmonic
nature of the tritone. This and other appellative intervals dictated the intervallic structure
of the major scale in the sense that the interval from degree seven to the tonic would be a semitone
(the „natural“ resolution of the upper term of an augmented fourth), the interval from degree
four to seven would be an augmented fourth, and so on, until our modern tonality (the major
scale) was established in an invariant intervallic order regardless of the pitch level of the tonic.
This is what Fetis means when he says that modern tonality possesses an inherent harmonic principle,
since it was the harmonic nature of the augmented fourth and its proper resolution which
shaped the scale in the first place. 42
Folgende Aussage von Michael Beiche legt nahe, dass Fétis eine sehr ähnliche Auffassung
über die Bedeutung des Dominantseptakkords hatte wie Choron (s.o.):
Die notwendige Auflösung der „harmonie dissonante“ (des Dominantseptakkords als Streben,
Anziehung und Bewegung) in die „harmonie consonnante“ (den Dreiklang mit dem Charakter
40 Simms, Choron, Fetis, S. 132.
41 Hyer, Tonality.
42 Simms, Choron, Fetis, S. 124f.
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