“Come una formica”: il ruolo dei temperamenti nella possibile genesi del dualismo armonico

During the 1600s, through the use of church keys in instrumental music, performance and composition practices that gave rise to tonality were consolidated. These practices adopted specific temperaments, and founded a theoretical explanation to modal criteria not entirely suitable for the new music phenomenon [Barnett 1998; Powers 1998]. The interactions that were created between theory, temperaments and praxis triggered a process of continuous reciprocal adjustment that led to the tonal theory, and the subsequent visions of tonality: the monistic one, based on thoroughbass, and the dualistic one, based on harmonic relations. This paper takes harmonic dualism as the theoretical agreement of the three subjects of tonal development. Through the structural analogy between temperaments and harmonic dualism, the paper explain how the latter could be generated in triadic relations from the first tonal praxis, and how through the modification of praxis over time it could take its current form. It’s hypothesized that, in the same way, temperaments have generated the coherence criterion which gives meaning to the triadic language, as identified by Lewin [1982]. It’s therefore argued that temperaments are the generating element of harmonic dualism, and that further investigations on the phenomenon in this direction may highlight new important elements in the fields of triadic relations and harmonic dualism.