The notions of modalité and tonalité in Russia’s nineteenth-century music theory

Abstract:
A gradual and controversial process of development of the terms ‘lad’ and ‘tonal'nost'’ in the context of music theory in Russia is traced in the article. Various options of the Russian translations and interpretations of the French terms modalité and tonalité, as well as those of the German terms Tonart and Tonalität, are considered; besides, an opposition in the content of the Greek term tropos and the Latin term modus is specifically clarified. Different definitions of the viewed notions from musical vocabularies and music theory textbooks of the nineteenth-century Russia are widely quoted and thoroughly analyzed.

Keywords:
Modalité, tonalité, Tonart, Tonalität, tropos, modus, ‘gravity’, resolution, the eight church modes, the leading tone, nineteenth-century music theory in Russia, Jean-Philippe Rameau, François-Joseph Fétis, François-Auguste Gevaert, Georg Simon Löhlein, Johann Leopold Fuchs, Hugo Riemann, Ludwig Bussler, Olivier Messiaen, Jacques Chailley, Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, Yury Arnold, Sergey Taneyev, Georgy Catoire, Boleslav Yavorsky, Yury Kholopov