ABSTRACT
Tonality has traditionally been understood as the foundation of the music composed in the common practice period of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The final element of dissatisfaction with the naturalist theory of tonality must be the almost exclusive concentration on harmony, when it is melody that is the usually predominant object of perceptual attention in tonal music. The historicist thesis, however, appears to have the merit of accounting for the development of both musical style and the theoretical justification in one comprehensive system. The dominant account of the aesthetic purpose of music was to represent the passions of the human soul; Rameau was explicit on this point, and so were nineteenth-century theorists such as Gottfried Weber and philosophers such as G. W. F. Hegel and Victor Cousin. To what extent the teleological nature of tonality was understood during the common practice period will be crucial for establishing the credibility of the interpretation of classical musical style.
