The Tonal Game

The Tonal Game (Sect. 15.1) is a fallback strategy by which a transmitted score is processed as a major or minor key. The strategy consists of three main defaults, the order of which is motivated by the Economical Principle: a tonality (first major, then minor)—the only context-free default; a robust key; and finally, a key. Chopin’s Mazurka, Op. 24/2, offers highly instructive examples of the Tonal Game at work, including a contextually motivated overruling of the very first default, a major tonality. Finally, Sect. 15.2 studies a possible connection between the extraordinary tonal richness of Chopin’s Mazurka and the emergence early in the nineteenth century of “Tonality” as a notion of both synchronic and diachronic content, most notably in the work of François-Joseph Fétis.