Tonality like the
piano keyboard has been the
instrument or
tool with, and/or through which we have created
joy.
But too much of any one sort of, thing, even one sort of joyful thing, can lead to boredom. Novelty, utility and unobviousness may well be the hallmarks of patentable things (except in the U.S.A., where utility is not necessary), but also of the things that bring us joy.
Certainly, this is the shock of the new as the art critic Robert Hughes has put it in his monumental television series, and book. Charles Rosen, and many others, have commented upon the fading power of certain music to move us. He refers to the common assumption that the keyboard has been overcomposed for. Maybe it IS true, that our minds still relate any series of notes we hear to a key, or series of keys, but is that where the joy of music originates?
Modes of compositions come and go as new practicioners arrive on the scene and feel that the old book has been closed. Stravinsky forcible closed one book with The Firebird, and buried it with Le Sacre de Printemps and Petrushka! (And there were riots!) Schoenberg also closed an old book with dodecaphonic music. They did this even as had Haydn and Beethoven, Chopin, Debussy and Ravel. We see this in so-called popular music as well, to differentiate it from so-called art music.
All music, as all art, and, indeed all life, is work in progress. For some of us, life, as art, and music, is like good dancing shoes. The felt on the bottom, which, by the way, is the same felt as on the hammers of a piano's keys, is what allows a dancer to use the ground. When scrapped with a metal brush, the felt is open and a bit sticky. Use flattens the felt until it is hard and slippery.
The best dancing is in the middle, neither at the sticky end, or at the slippery one. The best music, certainly the best improvisation (which maybe the key to it all), the best art, the best life is in the middle, between the sticky and slippery ends.
Those of us on the frontier understand this in our very being. As for angels, psychic hotlines and the existence of God--I accept that there is an innate reaching beyond, beyond what, I don't know, with what, I am not sure, to what, I cannot know.