ABSTRACT
The identity of a piece of Western tonal music is ordinarily assumed to derive from the way that pitch is organised within it. This is evident in the fact that the vernacular terms most commonly employed to refer to music are “tune” and “melody”, both of which can be defined as “a succession of notes varying in pitch and having a recognisable musical shape” (Penguin New Dictionary of Music, 1972). In addition, most music-theoretic or music-analytic writings of the last two hundred years have focused on the elucidation of music’s harmonic and melodic dimensions (see Bent, 1980; Palisca, 1980), exploring these primarily in terms of configurations of pitches and their inter-relations as scales, keys and modes under the banner of tonality.
