Fishing in the right place: analytical examples from the Tonalities project

This article is a supplement to Anthony Pople's `Using Complex Set Theory
for Tonal Analysis: an Introduction to the Tonalities Project'. At the end of his
unfinished article are the beginnings of two final sections. The first was to
consider `analyses of more challenging music (by Bruckner, Mahler, Delius,
Debussy, Schoenberg etc.)'; the second was to focus on the opening of Berg's
Der Wein and the concept of chord induction ± a topic not actually covered in
the article to that point. The passages for analysis were clearly those that had
made somewhat fleeting appearances in three presentations Pople gave on
Tonalities at Oxford, Reading and Bristol in 2000, 2001 and 2002.1 These
extracts, from music composed around the turn of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, will be examined here. They represent only about one
third of the works analysed during the Tonalities project, but are sufficient to
indicate the power of Tonalities as an analytical tool. A complete list of the 30
compositions analysed before Pople's untimely death is given in Fig. 1.2
This article attempts to develop the material left by Pople into a `performing
version'. It does not claim to reconstruct exactly what Pople would have
written, but tries to make many of the points he would have made, while
adding further commentary of which he would have approved. The aim is to
give an insight into the analytical output of Tonalities without embarking on an
overly extensive critique or development of Pople's work. At the end, some
ways in which the work may be taken forward are suggested. Some of these
were certainly in Pople's mind; others are entirely my own ideas.