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Origins of Western Tonal Expectation and its Compositional Utility: Research in support of "Fractured": An Original Composition for Pierrot Ensemble
Pogudin, Michael
Pogudin, Michael
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2026
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Music Composition
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https://doi.org/10.34944/h7m9-tg62
Abstract
One of my earliest yet clearest musical memories took place in front of my mother’s laptop when I was ten years old. I had no musical training at the time but found myself deeply attracted to classical music and often spent my free time browsing the internet, forcing the youtube recommendation algorithm to show me as many pieces as possible. That day I stumbled across a piece I hadn't seen before, a symphony by a man whose name I didn’t recognize at the time: Pyotr Tchaikovsky. The title told me it was the second movement of his fifth symphony. Curious, I clicked on the video and turned up my headphones. Around two minutes in, as the french horn and the clarinet finished their duet, the music wound down to a point where I thought we’d be returning “home,” so to speak. However, the harmony resolved to a completely different, and what seemed to me at the time random tonic. While I know today that Tchaikovsky uses a clever dominant voicing to modulate from D major to the distant F# major, at the time I was surprised and confused as to what had happened. I had expected something to happen harmonically and anticipated an entirely different resolution to the one Tchaikovsky had provided. Years later this concept fascinated me: if children seem to have harmonic expectations without any musical exposure or training, what are the apparently innate psychological and cognitive mechanisms behind this tonal expectation? And how do external social factors influence these mechanisms over time? Many composers in the past have used delayed expertise in compositional choices and perhaps even come closer to solving one of the mysteries of music: why does music make us feel? resolution, dissonance, and various other harmonic techniques to add to the passion and intensity of their work, but why do these means work so well? The answer may lie within our own psychobiology. By understanding the hows and whys of these concepts, one can exercise more.
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Livingstone Undergraduate Research Awards website: https://sites.temple.edu/livingstone/2026-livingstone-undergraduate-research-award-in-creative-works-and-media-production/
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