Tonality and Life (drawing, that is)

My mother, who was a musician before she became a painter, told me, as she was showing me her life drawing sketches, that these were her "scales." (The quotation marks are mine, of course.)

With certain exceptions, human beings have bodies with the same number and kinds of limbs, and when drawing an unclothed model, a well-schooled artist would learn to understand the structural components of the human body: the bones, muscles, tendons, and veins.

It occurred to me this morning, while I was reading (slowly, of course) through the extremely triadic and tonal Beethoven Piano Sonata, opus 79, that the variety of musical tools (texture, dynamics, voicing, phrase structure, repetition, silence, etc.) available when working with functional triadic harmony is akin to the structure of the human body.  The things that make every human body unique are like the things that make each piece of tonal music unique.

Whether you want to use the structural components that make a piece of music feel grounded in tonality or not, I think it is really important to study functional harmony as thoroughly as possible in order to write original and imaginative contemporary music that feels "right."  Functional harmony is, to me, like the bones, muscles, tendons, and veins that support music and allow it to flow.