McCreless and his "Evolutionary Perspective"

For an interesting read, check out:

McCreless, Patarick. “An Evolutionary Perspective on Nineteenth-Century Semitonal Relations.” The Second Parctice of Nineteenth-Century Tonality. Ed. William Kinderman and Harold Krebs. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1996. 87-113.

Here is my reaction to the article condensed into paragraph form:

The McCreless article offered some very interesting views in how to bridge so-called 'classical diatonic tonality' to 'nineteenth-century chromatic tonality.' He states that this nineteenth-century chromaticism has an underlying space made up of twelve diatonic keys, unlike the Schenkerian approach of a work having one diatonic key that governs the tonal space. McCreless relates this to the theory of biological evolution, suggesting that the older functions and styles of music have not disappeared in this new chromatic tonality, but have rather adapted themselves to take on different functions. Therefore, chromatic writing takes on a new role; instead of being a foreground event that falls back onto a tonal background, diatonic space becomes a “foreground with respect to the chromatic space demanded by the whole, which accordingly must be viewed as background” (McCreless 103). Instead of the Schenkerian process of justifying a chromatic passage in terms of some sort of diatonic prolongation, in 'nineteenth-century chromatic tonality' diatonic prolongation needs to be rationalized in a way that shows “how it fits into the larger context of chromatic space” (103).