THE TITLE OF Daniel Harrison's remarkable monograph immediately signals to the reader a familiar ambivalence—both historical and terminological—attending the tonal music composed throughout the twentieth century and since. A question arises: are we dealing with a musical repertory bound in an unbroken line to an earlier inheritance (“pieces of tradition”)? Or, are we confronting mere fragments of that line (“pieces of tradition”), the residual presence of what was previously whole? One suspects that Harrison—a writer never less than judicious in his word choice and placement of accent—has arranged this punning, rabbit/duck play of emphases quite intentionally. In the book's opening pages, he quickly draws readers into the historiographic debate surrounding our understandings of music in a key, deftly sketching the intersecting conceptual, acoustical, and psychological frameworks for what music theorists (at least since Fétis) have dubbed tonality. Harrison moves beyond the problematic music-historical trope of a sudden,...

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