To­nal­ity is the sys­tem of or­der of tones, that dis­tinc­tive or­der of sounds, in which a motif un­folds to­wards a melody. There are or­ders of to­nal­ity of very dif­fer­ent di­men­sions.

In the mu­sic his­tory of dif­fer­ent peo­ples we find com­pletely dif­fer­ent tonalities which to­day are er­ro­ne­ously pre­sented as scales, even though they are termed “to­nal­ity.”

Origi­nally, to­nal­ity is the mani­fes­ta­tion of the prin­ci­ple of in­nertonal struc­tur­ing of the mu­si­cal sound-space. While the motif un­folds into com­pletely dif­fer­ent melo­dies, into very dif­fer­ently struc­tured mu­si­cal pat­terns, each melody si­mul­ta­ne­ously upholds its own to­nal­ity as its very own sphere of life. This gives the melody in­ner and outer se­cu­rity dur­ing its crea­tive un­fold­ment.

The ori­gin of the to­nal­ity lies in the melody-tech­nique, just as the ori­gin of the melody-tech­nique lies in the to­nal­ity. The in­flu­ence of the to­nal­ity radi­ates into the world of the mu­si­cal sound-space and cre­ates its “at­mos­phere”.

To­nal­ity re­veals it­self in the ar­tis­tic mas­tery of the over­tones in a tone: in the lively and con­fi­dent use of that natu­ral, physi­cal, in­ner struc­ture of a tone which due to the pre­sent, in­cor­rect way of read­ing scores has com­pletely fallen into obliv­ion.

The over­tone-spec­trum may be pro­duced and per­ceived in very dif­fer­ent ways, and de­pend­ing on the ar­range­ment of the over­tones, on their to­nal­ity, it evokes very dif­fer­ent feel­ings, moods, and men­tal im­pres­sions within us lis­ten­ers. Since an over­tone-spec­trum, due to its na­ture, con­tains an in­fi­nite num­ber of di­verse tones which appear as in­di­vid­ual over­tones, their dif­fer­ent com­bi­na­tions re­sult in an end­less va­ri­ety of mu­si­cal sound-space struc­tures – an in­fi­nite di­ver­sity of tonalities.

The con­scious per­cep­tion of over­tones in our in­ner sense of hear­ing de­pends on the re­fine­ment of our hear­ing abil­ity. The fur­ther away the over­tones are from the ba­sic tone, the finer is their struc­ture, the fain­ter the sound, and hence the more dif­fi­cult they are to hear. Also, they are much closer to­gether, and thus much more dif­fi­cult to dif­fer­en­ti­ate.

Thus, while lis­ten­ing inside, one will even­tu­ally reach a limit where one can no longer dis­crimi­nate the pitch of two neigh­bour­ing over­tones; a limit where one’s men­tal abil­ity to dif­fer­en­ti­ate, one’s in­tel­lec­tual abil­ity to dis­crimi­nate – with re­gard to the tone – are no longer ef­fi­cient, and all fur­ther over­tones will at best be per­ceived as noise.

With the sys­tem­atic train­ing of the men­tal power of dis­crimi­na­tion the mu­si­cian or the lis­tener pene­trates, with his in­ner ear, deeper and deeper into the na­ture-given world of mu­si­cal sound-spaces, and on the level of his feel­ing, de­pend­ing on the re­fine­ment of his per­cep­tion, he will hear and rec­og­nize the dif­fer­ent tonalities in the in­ner­most worlds of mu­sic: those mani­fold “plane­tary orbits of the mu­si­cal sound-space.”