The term "pandiatonicism" was coined by Nicolas Slonimsky in the second edition of Music Since 1900 (1938) to describe harmonic language that uses the notes of any diatonic scale in a non-tonal manner.
It is a somewhat problematic term for two reasons:
- It is partly defined by what it is not: It is not tonal, despite being based primarily on the diatonic notes of any key or scale.
- There appears to be no widely-accepted understanding of the term beyond acceptance of the idea that it involves almost exclusively diatonic notes; it is defined differently by different writers.
- It does not use functional harmony progressions, such as ii - V - I, IV - I, V - vi, etc., because these are the harmonic building blocks that establish a key in tonal music.
- It does not follow the voice-leading conventions of tonality that apply to the resolution of tendency tones, which include:
- Chord extensions: 7ths, 9ths, 11ths, and 13ths,
- The leading tone in dominant harmony,
- Suspensions and retardations,
- The 5th of diminished chords.
- The next two voice-leading practices are common in tonal music, but I don't think they apply to pandiatonicism:
- The 6 & 4 of the cadential 6/4 (I don't see how pandiatonic music can have a cad. 6/4, since it is part of a progression that typically establishes a key),
- Most chromatically-altered notes (this is irrelevant if only diatonic notes are used).
- Can pandiatonic music have a tonic chord or tonic note? As you can see in the discussion below there is disagreement on this. My feeling is that it can, as long as it is not established by the means used in tonal music. Establishing a tonic note or chord through non-tonal means can be challenging, but it is not impossible
Another problematic aspect is that it is defined differently by different people. For example:
- The Wikipedia article on Pandiatonicism states that "all seven degrees of the diatonic scale [are] used freely in democratic equality."
- I believe that this idea came from Slonminsky (1938). I take this to mean that there is no hierarchy of diatonic notes and triads, unlike tonal music, in which different notes and triads often have specific roles to play, such as dominant-function chords (V, vii°), predominant-function chords (IV, ii), and tonic chords.
- The composer in me finds this to be an interesting idea. The problem with this description, however, is that I don't think that many of the works cited as examples of pandiatonicism have this quality (democratic equality of all diatonic notes).
- Richard Kostelanetz, in A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes (2013, 465) writes: "The functional importance of the primary triads...remains undiminished in pandiatonic harmony." (Wikipedia says that this "appears to be quoting Slonminsky, FWIW.)
- I find this an odd statement. How is music in which primary triads have undiminished functional importance any different from tonality?
- On the other hand, Bryan R. Simms argues that "pandiatonicism does not project a clear and stable tonic" (Music of the Twentieth Century: Style and Structure (1986, 63-64).
- This is closer to my understanding of pandiatonicism.
- Also from Wikipedia: "Pandiatonic music typically uses the diatonic notes freely in dissonant combinations without conventional resolutions and/or without standard chord progressions, but always with a strong sense of tonality due to the absence of chromatics."
- I agree with the everything in the above statement until the last part: "always with a strong sense of tonality due to the absence of chromatics.
- Wait… what? If you play a random series of pointillistic white notes, or white note clusters, on piano, will it necessarily result in music with a "strong sense of tonality?" Tonality isn't just about the notes used in a passage of music; it's about the way those notes are used. The only way for music to have a "strong sense of tonality" is for it to be tonal.
- In Slonminky's 1947 edition of his Music Since 1900 he suggested that pandiatonicism can be considered to be "a diatonic counterpart of Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique, whereby melodies may be made up of seven different notes of the diatonic scale, and then be inverted, retrograded, or both. According to this system, "strict pandiatonic counterpoint" may use progressions of seven different notes in each voice, with no vertical duplication" ("Pandiatonicism," in Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 21 Jan, 2024).
- This is another interesting compositional idea that might be fun to try, but I would suggest that almost no works that get cited as examples of pandiatonicism have this quality.
Here is my suggestion for composition students: I encourage you to try writing something that can be considered pandiatonic if the idea interests you.
However, given the fact that a universally agreed-upon definition of pandiatonicism does not exist, I would like to suggest the following guidelines:
- Avoid anything in melodic lines or harmonic progressions that suggests tonality.
- Avoid establishing a tonic. Or if this is too disturbing, establish a tonic, but not by any method associated with tonality; for example, Ti-Do and So-Do, if supported by dominant-to-tonic (or dominant to sub-mediant) harmony, are overtly tonal and should therefore be avoided.
→ On the other hand, if Ti-Do is supported by non-tonic-to-dominant harmony, such as iii to ii7, or I7 to IV, it is available. - Aim to use all pitches of whatever scale you use equitably and democratically.
- Triads may be used only if they do not progress as they do in tonal music.
→ See the Kostka & Payne chord progression chart below for a summary of how diatonic chords usually progress in tonal music. - Try to use non-triadic constructions as well, such as quartal and quintal harmony.
→ One challenge in using these types of harmonies is that, depending on what note you start on, you might end up with accidentals if trying to maintain a vertical structure of perfect fourths, such as C - F - Bb - Eb - Ab, etc. While occasional accidentals are fine in pandiatonicism, for the most part the objective is to avoid them.
→ If you want to write quartal harmony using only perfect fourths and white notes (i.e., no accidentals), for example, you could build up from B: B - E - A - D - G - C - F.
→ If you want to try this with quintal harmony, build up from the last note above (F): F - C - G - D - A - E - B. - Give Slonminsky's serialist diatonicism a try if you wish, but it is not necessary to do so.
You may find it challenging to write music you enjoy without borrowing common practices from tonal music; therein lies the reason tonal music is so widely embraced: Its practices have evolved over centuries to sound good to Western ears. We talk about Ti "wanting" to rise to Do in a V-I progression, or of a chord seventh "wanting" to resolve down by step to a consonance in the next chord, or a 4 "wanting" to resolve down to 3 in a 4-3 suspension, because these practices sound good or "right" to our ears, so writing tonal music in which these practices are not followed can feel very "wrong" to us.
(On a side note, I am curious to know if the tonal music practices that sound "right" to our ears have corollaries in music of other cultures, such as South-Indian classical music, or traditional Chinese music. Do they use anything like dominant-tonic harmony?)
For this reason, you may find it easier to write pandiatonic music that avoids triadic progressions, such as Slonminsky's serialist approach to diatonicism, or pointillistic music in which widely-spaced notes are distributed in unpredictable ways.
I'll stop here for now; I will post some links to pandiatonic music in my next blog post.
Please let me know your thoughts below in the comments section!
How diatonic chords in classical music usually progress: Chord-Flow Chart (from Kostka, Stefan M., and Dorothy Payne. Tonal harmony: With an introduction to twentieth-Century music. New York etc.: McGraw-Hill, 2009. P. 111):
Check out the next post, Pandiatonicism 2, to listen to various works that some have claimed to be pandiatonic.
You may also like these posts on Post-Tonal Harmony Ideas:
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9 comments:
I am the first person to leave a comment on this post, so that should be a 10 I think.
If not, I will proceed to explain my thoughts:
Pandiatonicism is an interesting idea, and the one where I feel that most of my composition work lives in. I find that pandiatonicism is sort of like a gateway to new harmonic ideas without completely leaving the "know" harmonic devices of composers of the Western Classical canon. In what I think is a good analogy, something that to me that explains pandiatonicism in a relatively accurate way is if I go from Ecuador to a trip to Spain. Both countries speak Spanish, but the culture and even the dialect is very different, but in a way that thanks to the common element (laguage) this difference in culture somehow feels very familiar.
I think in pandiatonicism, voice leading that moves slowly and in small leaps is an element that really characterizes this kind of harmony, as it allows the composer to move around freely between all the keys, and even though you might not be thinking exactly about the keys themselves as areas with a tonal centre, yo still keep the familiarity of having something to gravitate towards, and you can freely move away via voice leading whenever you feel like you need to move.
That was Jessica Ozon btw
My piece Óraunverulegt shows three different examples of how pandiatonicism can be used in a composition. My first example is my first movement. It is aleatoric in natural so it can go in a pointillistic direction. The notes I chose are all based on the A Lydian mode technically but each instrument creates different chord or scalar passages in the row that it belongs to. Add on its aleatoric nature; one cannot perceive a tonic in the first movement. In my Second movement I wanted to do a ultra-serialist composition. The rows are again, based on the A lydian mode, but of course the motif's that are created in the composition are serial so they can in the slightest way be linked to functional harmony. The third movement is almost ultra-minimalistic. This is the most functional piece interns of its harmony but because of how many parts there are and their influence to the pieces tonal centre, you cannot tell who has the actual tonal centre in the piece. There is a functional harmonic progression but it doesn't act in a typical functional progression
I'm not sure if I have much compositional experience with pandiatonicism (unless I've written a pandiatonic piece before and didn't realize it), but it is something I'd like to experiment with in the future, possibly for a future composition assignment if the guidelines allow for it.
I do agree that the term itself could be problematic because the word "diatonic" in the name suggests some form of tonality. I think a better name for it would be something along the lines of "diatonic atonality". Sure it doesn't roll off the tongue as well, but at least atonality is suggested here.
With respect to whether or not a piece that uses pandiatonicism can have a tonic note/chord, I think it can for form purposes. In this case, the tonic note/chord could signal a repeat of the piece's main idea. However, as you mentioned in your post, this note/chord should not suggest tonality.
(By the way, my first comment was sent under the handle "ajmbriffett", but I changed it to my name so I would be easier to identify for grading purposes).
I can see the controversy in defining a term by what it is not because there is no tangible definition of what can be considered. Typically, we search for inverse terms that can appropriately describe what pandiatonicism exactly is. Also, the set of rules does provide a tangible and real idea of what pandiatonicism isn't; therefore, we can assess a piece and determine if it falls under the category of pandiatonicism or not.
I believe that pandiatonicism can be defined as freedom of musical technique or void of typical tonal voice leading, relying on the diatonic scale. I think it is interesting to explore the variety of tonal harmony beyond that in the Western Classical Canon. It vaguely resembles popular music; of course, most popular music does not rely on atonality, but it does not abide by strict tonal patterns and tendencies exhibited in WCM. By not relying on such harmonies, composers are opened to a whole new world of variety in terms of composition and are free to explore ideas not often encountered.
I do, however, see a challenge in avoiding melodic lines suggesting tonality, as melodic leading can become muddy when being led to a place that does not necessarily exist, as keys and regular modes imply tonality as it is. It would be the job of the composer to create an interesting line that carries no tendency or ignores tendency in a way that is pleasing to the ear. However, I don't believe that this necessarily cannot be done.
I agree with the sentiment that defining a concept by what it is not can be confusing and difficult but the idea of treating diatonic scales like other collections to write post tonal music is interesting to me.
As I was reading, I couldn't help but think about how other non-diatonic collections can offer tonal harmonies (i.e Messiaen's modes are not diatonic scales but include notes that could form some very tonal sounding harmonies, something I have done in some of my compositions). This idea helps me to make sense of pan diatonicism as where it can be possible to create tonal sounding chords and chord progressions using non-diatonic scales I think the reverse (using diatonic scales to make post-tonal music) would work and be interesting as well.
I’ve always found things that are defined by the qualities that they don’t possess to be unusual since it’s not really a definition at all. Like, you can say that a circle is not a square, but that still doesn’t describe a circle. I can understand naming Slonimsky’s original idea of pandiatonicism as it would fall under a subclassification of serialism. In that case he was effectively naming a technique that already had its qualities ascribed to it. However, if you try to go by all the other varying definitions of pandiatonicism, which are so different from the logical process from which the term was originally coined, it makes me wonder if there even is a purpose of trying to label something using, for lack of a better term, an ‘anti-definition’.
When pandiatonicism was mentioned in class, I imagined it was just the use of a diatonic scale without tonality. While this is true I didn't consider the rule of having each note be of equal importance or the use of a seven tone matrix for the scale.
This has really opened my eyes to the possibilities of pandiatonicism.
I am curious about how matrix's work with a seven note row. Do you borrow from a new diatonic scale when playing different versions of the row like you would when playing different versions in a twelve tone row? Or do the exact intervals used in the order of the row change? (semitones change to whole tones depending on the starting note of the row.) I'm assuming it is the second option because the first option would break the rule of pandiatonicism.
Anyways. Maybe I will write a pan diatonic piece and it will answer these questions for me.
I think pandiatonicism is an interesting concept because it is fascinating to reflect on how it even became a practice. In one sense, my immediate thought was that pandiatonicism feels like a return to one’s musical roots. By throwing away the concept of tonality, pandiatonicism aims to create music using 7 diatonic pitches in an equal way, with no further labels (such as “tonic” or “dominant”) attached to them. Thinking about pandiatonicism in this way feels to me like when you first learn piano, and the only palette that’s available to you to create things with so far are the white keys. This makes sense to use as a compositional technique, oftentimes restriction can lead to positive creative outcomes. Nonetheless, the first thoughts in my mind while reading this blog post revolved around simplicity, and the freedom to use the white keys on the piano to create something new and simple. Pandiatonicism felt like leaving everything I knew about theory behind, and starting anew. This is when I realized how flawed this thinking was.
The white keys on the piano have the intervals of a typical major or minor scale, or church mode: TTSTTTS. These scales are rooted in western culture, and while they feel familiar to me and how I was raised musically, that is certainly not a universal experience. For example, I am currently taking Gamelan, and the Gamelan Degung music we are studying operates on the basis of a particular 5-note scale. Or another example might be somebody in rural Newfoundland raised on acoustic guitar. “Simple”, or “returning to their musical roots” to them might be a short progression in E or A major, which involves chromatically altered notes. So in reality, the idea that pandiatonicism is a “return to simplicity” is deeply ingrained in my own personal experience, and not at all shared by all musicians, or universal in any way.
I think pandiatonicism is a cool idea, especially if executed properly by whichever definition we chose to follow. The idea of using all notes equally can be a super cool concept to explore, and can probably lead to some super cool music. However, for anyone who had a similar experience to my initial reaction to pandiatonicism, I think it’s important to separate that idea of being “basic” from the actual meaning of pandiatonicism. I don’t think it is right to call every piece that is in c major, or every piece that uses no flats/sharps, pandiatonicism. I believe that the concept of using all the notes equally is an important, and interesting, part of pandiatonicism. In reality, I think that pandiatonicism can be a very complex and advanced technique when used correctly and intentionally.
(also sad fact: I wrote this in February and forgot to post it)
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