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Tonality: Defintion of Tonality and Tonal Music
The term tonality encompasses all of the musical elements that go into establishing a musical key, also called a tonal centre. Music based on 24 keys, equal temperament, and tonality is usually referred to as tonal music, or sometimes Western tonal music.
The great majority of the popular music of the West is tonal music, including nearly all 5,000 songs on the GSSL. (And the music of composers such as Bach, Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Tchaikovsky, etc.)
Tonality refers to all of the organized relationships of pitches around a key note or tonic centre, including:
- The tonic note or key note itself
- The scale named for, and related to, the tonic note, and used to create melody
- The chords related to the tonic note and built on that scale, used to create harmony.
Just think of “tonality” as meaning the same thing as “key.”