Nota Bene
The second paragraph is taken from Dahlhaus’s book on harmony.

The idea seems to support the argument that “harmony” can be thought of as “constructed.” Harmony is an intellectual act of coordination. That harmony is metaphysical was the point I wished to make (Dahlhaus calls it ‘anthropological,’ which doesn’t seem quite right, since it is actually a bit of anachronistic criticism of metaphysics). I think Dasein precedes anthropology as a positive science. Although Fétis said harmony was/is cultural he was trying to get at something basic and more universally structured, radical. As I understand tonality, the musico-acoustical “facts” become merely “examples” or indivisible systematic placeholders (variables) in a structure. They could be anything: chess pieces or monads. Their order is representational. This structure is outside music. It is the organizing function of sensitivity and will, a Kantian notion, I think, that seem to be most significant. I think Fétis saw it thus: - “behind these scales...” - a metaphysical structure. And since he was a composer and critic of music his insight was not appreciated as philosophical. Berlioz hated him. Note Reimann’s naturalistic view, the barbarian.

http://www.answers.com/topic/tonality
“Fétis (1844) defined tonality, specifically tonalité moderne as the, “set of relationships, simultaneous or successive, among the tones of the scale,” allowing for other types de tonalités among different cultures. Further he considered tonalité moderne as “trans-tonic order” and tonalité anciennce “uni-tonic order”, trans-tonic meaning simply that the dominant seventh both establishes the key and allows for modulation to other keys. He described his earliest example of tonalité moderne: “In the passage quoted here from Monteverdi’s madrigal [Cruda amarilli, mm.9-19 and 24-30], one sees a tonality determined by the accord parfait [root position major chord] on the tonic, by the sixth chord assigned to the third and seventh degrees, by the optional choice of the accord parfait or the sixth chord on the sixth degree, and finally, by the accord parfait and, above all, by the unprepared seventh chord (with major third) on the dominant” (p.171).

Fétis believed that tonality, tonalite moderne, was entirely cultural, “For the elements of music, nature provides nothing but a multitude of tones differing in pitch, duration, and intensity by the greater or least degree...The conception of the relationships that exist among them is awakened in the intellect, and, by the action of sensitivity on the one hand, and will on the other, the mind coordinates the tones into different series, each of which corresponds to a particular class of emotions, sentiments, and ideas. Hence these series become various types of tonalities” (p.11f). “But one will say, ‘What is the principle behind these scales, and what, if not acoustic phenomena and the laws of mathematics, has set the order of their tones?’ I respond that this principle is purely metaphysical [anthropological]. We conceive this order and the melodic and harmonic phenomena that spring from it out of our conformation and education” (p.249). In contrast, Hugo Riemann believed tonality, “affinities between tones” or tonverwandtshaften, was entirely natural and, following Moritz Hauptmann (1853), that the major third and perfect fifth where the only “directly intelligible” intervals, and that I, IV, and V, the tonic, subdominant, and dominant where related by the perfect fifths between their roots (Dahlhaus 1990, p.101-2).”

Note the following: from, What is American about American music?
http://musicmavericks.publicradio.org/features/essay_gann02.html
By Kyle Gann for American Public Media
“Then, in 1840 virtuosos like violinist Ole Bull began to concertize across America. In 1843, Ureli Corelli Hill and members of the fledgeling New York Philharmonic presented the first string quartet series. Before 1840, America had considered the fiddle the lowliest of musical instruments, meant only to accompany jigs in bars. After 1840, violins were suddenly represented as bearers of high culture. John Sullivan Dwight, known as “the dean of Boston music critics,” championed Beethoven and described the glories of European music in terms of religious ecstasy. Dwight was a part of the Transcendentalist movement centered around Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau; Dwight had joined Bronson Alcott, Louisa May Alcott’s father, in an ill-fated communal living experiment at a place called Brook Farm. The Transcendentalists threw their weight on the side of European culture.

Margaret Fuller, one of the movement’s leading intellectuals, went so   far as to write an imaginary letter to Beethoven, who at the time had been dead for 16 years:
...oh blessed master!,” she wrote. “Like a humble wife to the sage, or poet, it is my triumph that I can understand and cherish thee.... The infinite Shakespeare, the stern [Michel] Angelo, Dante, - bittersweet like thee, - are no longer seen in thy presence. ...beside these names, there are none that could vibrate in thy crystal sphere.... There is none greater than Shakespeare; he, too, is a god; but his creations are successive; thy fiat comprehends them all.

Nevertheless, Charles Ives, seeing a different side of Transcendentalism, would write many years later: “Thoreau was a great musician, not because he played the flute, but because he did not have to go to Boston to hear ‘The Symphony.’”
Against this roaring wind of European aesthetics, joined as it was to pious morality and upper-class pretensions, certain American composers still campaigned for an indigenous tradition, an American music that had something American about it.

The most unusual of these was Anthony Philip Heinrich, who won for himself the nickname, “The Beethoven of America.” Though born into a merchant family in Bohemia in 1781, Heinrich immigrated to America after his family business was destroyed by the Napoleonic Wars. Once in America, he decided to make a living through music, in which he had previously been only an amateur. He pushed inland to Lexington, Kentucky, where, in 1817, he put together the first American performance of a Beethoven symphony, No. 1. Convalescing in a log cabin in the Kentucky wilderness in 1818, Heinrich had a vision that he should compose music, and so at the age of 37, he taught himself theory and became a composer....”



And somewhere else in KY:

Jim Crow (a minstrel character)
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/calheritage/Jimcrow/

“Weel a-bout and turn a-bout / And do just so. / Every time I weel a-bout /  I jump Jim Crow.”
“Turning and wheeling and jumping just so, Thomas Dartmouth Rice—one of the white pioneers in comic representations of blacks—shuffled across the American stage in 1832, giving the country its first international hit song. But “Daddy” Rice did not invent Jim Crow; he observed him somewhere in Kentucky or Ohio, co-opting the image and dialect for himself and the entertainment of his audience.”
“But who was Jim Crow? Unknown. It’s thought that he was a slave from Cincinnati, Ohio; others say he was from Charleston, South Carolina.  Another faction holds that Jim Crow derived from old man Crow, the slaveholder. A final group says that the Crow came from the simile, black as a crow. Whatever the case, by 1838, the term was wedged into the language as a synonym for Negro. Thus, “Jim Crow laws” meant Negro laws.”
Minstrelsy swept the world in the 1830s and ‘40s much the same way that rock and roll did more than a hundred years later. In the same way that Elvis Presley electrified the world, so did Daddy Rice when he did “Jump Jim Crow.”
Thomas Rice’s spectacular success with “Jim Crow” helped spark a new entertainment industry. President John Tyler’s inauguration featured a blackface song and, across the ocean, minstrel performers entertained Queen Victoria.
At a time when America was seeking its cultural voice, “Jim Crow” and similar songs heralded a uniquely American sound.
“Our only national melody, Yankee Doodle, is shrewdly suspected to be a scion from British art... “Jump Jim Crow” is a dance native to this country, and one which we plead guilty to seeing with pleasure.”
Margaret Fuller
Fuller's Sublimations
Hectar Berlioz
Evenings with the Orchestra
Wagner's Problem
On Nature
Maine Woods
Olde Manse
Name: N. Hawthorne