“i love tonality!”
During my undergraduate years, this was something I gushed to at least two of my professors on different occasions, during brief precious moments of one-on-one time with them. What exactly did I mean by this exclamation, and why did I feel so strong a need to make it that I made it more than once? To some degree, I was saying it because it was simply true—my undergraduate years were a period of headily exciting discovery about the wonders of the eighteenth-century European classical tonal system and the Great Works that monumentalized it.1 I spent entire afternoons in those days at the keyboard just blissed out on the ii chord and marveling at its ii-chord-ness (not even the iiø7, not even the Neapolitan, not even the V/V—just the regular old diatonic ii chord). All the same, there was inevitably a performative aspect to my...
