Roots of the Classical The Popular Origins of Western Music [Hardcover]

Roots of the Classicalidentifies and traces to their source the patterns that make Western classical music unique, setting out the fundamental laws of melody and harmony, and sketching the development of tonality between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. The author then focuses on the years 1770-1910, treating the Western music of this period - folk, popular, and classical - as a single, organically developing, interconnected unit in which the popular idiom was constantly feeding into 'serious' music, showing how the same patterns underlay music of all kinds.

I. The Melodic Foundations
1. The subtle mathematics of music
2. The Ramellian paradigm
3. The children's chant
4. The pentatonic scale
II. The Harmonic Revolution
5. Primitive harmony
6. The discovery of tonality
7. Rivals to tonality
8. Dissonance and discord
9. The evolution of tonality
III. The Melodic Counter-Revolution
10. The invention of folk-music
11. The cantilena style
12. The debt to the East
13. Drones and ostinatos
14. Melodic line
15. Sequences
16. Relatively diatonic modes
17. Chromatic modes and scales
18. The polka family
19. The early waltz
20. The later waltz
21. The waltz suite
22. The continuing Italian ascendancy
23. Melody
24. Harmony
25. Tonal counterpoint
26. Romantic nationalism
27. The symphonic tradition
28. Wagner and the vernacular
29. The roots of Modernism
30. The Modernist conspiracy
31. The late vernacular
32. The blues and early jazz

This is a marvelously stimulating and important book: a masterpiece of canny observation, a miracle of effective organization, a model of colorful, pungent writing, and an ear-opener that should be read and pondered by all scholars and musicians who deal with music of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries in any and all of its genres. --Music & Lettl£x