Editing Tonality (section)

=== Systematic organization ===
The word tonality may describe any systematic organization of pitch phenomena in any music at all, including pre-17th century western music as well as much non-western music, such as music based on the [[slendro]] and [[pelog]] pitch collections of Indonesian [[gamelan]], or employing the modal nuclei of the [[Arabic maqam]] or the Indian [[raga]] system.

This sense also applies to the tonic/dominant/subdominant harmonic constellations in the theories of [[Jean-Philippe Rameau]] as well as the 144 basic transformations of [[twelve-tone technique]]. By the middle of the 20th century, it had become "evident that triadic structure does not necessarily generate a tone center, that non-triadic harmonic formations may be made to function as referential elements, and that the assumption of a twelve-tone complex does not preclude the existence of tone centers".{{sfnp|Perle|1991|p=8}}

For the composer and theorist [[George Perle]], tonality is not "a matter of 'tone-centeredness', whether based on a 'natural' hierarchy of pitches derived from the overtone series or an 'artificial' pre compositional ordering of the pitch material; nor is it essentially connected to the kinds of pitch structures one finds in traditional diatonic music".{{sfnp|Pitt|1995|p=291}} This sense (like some of the others) is susceptible to ideological employment, as Schoenberg, did by relying on the idea of a progressive development in musical resources "to compress divergent ''fin-de-siècle'' compositional practices into a single historical lineage in which his own music brings one historical era to a close and begins the next." From this point of view, twelve-tone music could be regarded "either as the natural and inevitable culmination of an organic motivic process ([[Anton Webern|Webern]]) or as a historical ''Aufhebung'' ([[Theodor W. Adorno|Adorno]]), the dialectical synthesis of late Romantic motivic practice on the one hand with a musical sublimation of tonality as pure system on the other".{{sfnp|Hyer|2001a}}