Richard Ratner is a Providence, RI based composer, teacher and pianist. His teachers include John Lessard (composition) at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and Menahem Pressler (piano), for whom he was the teaching assistant at Indiana University for many years. He has served as a member of the piano faculty at the Chicago Musical College of Roosevelt University, taught piano at the Conservatoires of Montbelliard and Belfort in France, and been a chamber music coach at Boston Conservatory. H
Many have gotten accustomed to the idea that educated musicians scoff at something like my Andante for Strings because it employs tonal vocabulary and was written a few years ago. Music is simply frequencies impinging on the listener's eardrums. Music's function, like that of all art, is to move the perceiver through its beauty, feeling, meaning, emotion, novelty, etc. How wonderful it is that we have the capacity to be moved, to receive meaning, from sounds which, unlike words, refer to nothing but ea
Tonality is a language. Over the course of many centuries it has developed a rich and complex vocabulary of pitch relationships that has meaning for a great number of people. This vocabulary derives primarily from the consonant or dissonant qualities of intervals that are themselves likely products of the overtone series, and is capable of imparting meaning over a wide variety of time spans. The suggestion that the language of tonality is stale is exactly as silly as making that statement about any other la