ABSTRACT
The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the decline of the tonal system, which had been an important organizing factor in music since the early Baroque period. In its place came not a new system but a splintering, a multiplicity of solutions to the problems of harmonic progression and tonality. At the most general level, music is either tonal or not tonal (usually termed “atonal”), but various approaches may be taken in both of those categories. As we shall see, even the “tonal” music of the twentieth century was of a new sort, one without a standardized vocabulary of harmonic progressions.
