On The Return to Tonality...

As I put the finishing touches to my song-cycle Dreams of Longing, something that has been gradually dawning on me has finally come headlong to my attention – how tonal my music has become in the last two years. When did this happen? How did it happen? How can I have gone through such a volte-face in such a short space of time?Well, I guess the most obvious reason is that this change has occurred with no longer being in full-time education – no longer having to be accountable for every note on the page, something that is easier to achieve with heavily pre-composed chromatic music. Also, now composing entirely away from the security of the PhD has led to a certain sort of pragmatism in my composing that has moved me away from the chromatic to the tonal. Another major factor is that I have composed a large amount of choral and vocal music in this period, genres of music which don’t necessarily lend themselves well to dissonant and disjunct music.I don’t think that this transformation has occurred overnight, nor is it something that I am hugely worried about – I think that the end-product and the compositional techniques taking place are very similar to the pre-2008 works. I have always been fascinated by tonality and using tonality in new ways in my work – this fascination dates back to works from 2004 and maybe beyond. I guess it has become more pronounced in my recent work; the choral pieces Invocation and How Clear How Lovely, the clarinet and flute duet The Strawberry Thief and this most recent work Dreams of Longing. In the song-cycle, there is even a tonal journey taking place from B major to B major via a variety of distant keys, something I would have never contemplated two years ago.I guess what the pertinent question is, is whether this development mirrors a larger-scale development in composers generally? Are contemporary composers returning to tonality? Is it important? Maybe it is just me...PAC