• From Scarlatti to ‘Guantanamera’: Dual tonicity in Spanish and Latin American Musics

    Author(s):
    PETER MANUEL (see profile)
    Date:
    2002
    Item Type:
    Article
    Permanent URL:
    https://doi.org/10.17613/1rc5-kx24
    Abstract:
    The ending on the "dominant"chord, far from being a mannerism of one particular song, is a standard feature of an entire corpus of Latin American and Spanish song genres, dating back at least to the eighteenth-century keyboard fandangos of Domenico Scarlatti and Antonio Soler. Rather than constituting a mere cadential idiosyncracy, it is the most salient indicator of a system of tonality that is somewhat distinct from Western common practice.Properly understood, it represents a form of dual tonicity emerging from related traditions of modal harmony. In the present essay I again commence with Andalusian tonality, which is related but not identical to that focused on here; I then proceed back in history to the Spanish baroque and from there westward to the Americas.In the processI seek to call attention to this fairly wide- spread alternate form of tonicity, to suggest some tentative outlines of its evolution, and to argue for the need to revise conventional musicological and theoretical approaches to it.
    Metadata:
    Published as:
    Journal article    
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    4 months ago
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