What we think of as tonality in Music is
perhaps nothing more than a confused concept about
how sounds are centered in Space.
Like a tree which reaches from root to crown, suspended
between earth and open sky, sounds move to naturally
center themselves in a dynamic web of relationships.
Implied in this is that what has been called a-tonal
music simply cannot or does not exist.
At the same time, it must be said that much music has
indeed been written that lacks strong, clear, articulate
centers.
Trying to find one’s way in such music is much like
the exasperating experience of trying to navigate on
foot through prototypically featureless urban landscapes.
Who does not know this feeling, when offered no
center, of being lost before the very beginning?
When music loses its relationship to dance,
it loses its sustaining and nurturing resonance with
the physical body, both of the individual performer
and, by implication, that of the Earth itself;
When music loses its relationship to poetry,
it loses its sustaining and nurturing resonance
with the human voice and, by implication,
the more subtle realms
of meaning and things spiritual.
Generative chaos is the rich
polyphony of simultaneous orders of movement,
characteristic of, for example, both living sound
and water;
Degenerative chaos occurs when movements,
natural or otherwise, contradict, that is—speak
against, or fight against, one another. The most
extreme example is perhaps human conflict once
it is energized by absolute belief;
Passive chaos—perhaps the most difficult of the
three to understand—is the mysterious state of
motionlessness or silence which is full of the
potential energy of neutrality.