Tonality - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Tonality is a system of music

Music

Music is an art form whose medium is sound and silence. Its common elements are pitch , rhythm , dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture...

in which specific hierarchical

Hierarchy

A hierarchy is an arrangement of items in which the items are represented as being "above," "below," or "at the same level as" one another...

pitch

Pitch (music)

Pitch is an auditory perceptual property that allows the ordering of sounds on a frequency-related scale.Pitches are compared as "higher" and "lower" in the sense associated with musical melodies,...

relationships are based on a key

Key (music)

In music theory, the term key is used in many different and sometimes contradictory ways. A common use is to speak of music as being "in" a specific key, such as in the key of C major or in the key of F-sharp. Sometimes the terms "major" or "minor" are appended, as in the key of A minor or in the...

"center", or tonic

Tonic (music)

In music, the tonic is the first scale degree of the diatonic scale and the tonal center or final resolution tone. The triad formed on the tonic note, the tonic chord, is thus the most significant chord...

. The term tonalité originated with Alexandre-Étienne Choron

Alexandre-Étienne Choron

Alexandre-Étienne Choron for a short time directed the Paris Opera. He played an essential role in France in making a clear distinction between sacred and secular music, and was one of the originators of French interest in musicology.- Biography :Choron studied mathematics at the collège de Juilly...

(1810) and was borrowed by François-Joseph Fétis

François-Joseph Fétis

François-Joseph Fétis was a Belgian musicologist, composer, critic and teacher. He was one of the most influential music critics of the 19th century, and his enormous compilation of biographical data in the Biographie universelle des musiciens remains an important source of information today...

in 1840 (Reti, 1958; Simms 1975, 119; Judd, 1998; Dahlhaus 1990). Although Fétis used it as a general term for a system of musical organization and spoke of types de tonalités rather than a single system, today the term is most often used to refer to Major-Minor tonality (also called diatonic tonality, common practice tonality, or functional tonality), the system of musical organization of the common practice period

Common practice period

The common practice period, in the history of Western art music , spanning the Baroque, Classical, and Romantic periods, lasted from c. 1600 to c. 1900.-General characteristics:...

, and of Western-influenced popular music throughout much of the world today.
David Cope

David Cope

David Cope is an American author, composer, scientist, and professor emeritus of music at the University of California, Santa Cruz...

(1997,) considers key

Key (music)

, consonance

Consonance and dissonance

In music, a consonance is a harmony, chord, or interval considered stable, as opposed to a dissonance , which is considered to be unstable...

and dissonance

Consonance and dissonance

In music, a consonance is a harmony, chord, or interval considered stable, as opposed to a dissonance , which is considered to be unstable...

(or relaxation and tension, respectively), and hierarchical relationships to be the three most basic concepts in tonality.