Polytonality

Polytonality is the simultaneous use of two or more distinct tonal centers in a musical passage. It lets separate musical parts retain recognizable keys at the same time.

Bitonality: The simultaneous use of two distinct tonal centers in music. The two-key case is polytonality’s most familiar form.
Petrouchka chord: A dissonant polychord combining C-major and F-sharp-major triads. Stravinsky’s famous sonority makes two tonal collections collide in one chord.
Charles Ives: An American composer whose works combined hymn tunes, marches, and experimental techniques. Ives used overlapping tonal layers in works written before polytonality became widely discussed.
Atonality: Music that avoids establishing a governing tonal center. Polytonality retains multiple centers, whereas atonality avoids a stable tonal hierarchy.
Polychord: A chord formed by sounding two or more distinct chords simultaneously. Polychords can create vertical snapshots of multiple tonal centers.
Piano Sonata No. 2 (Ives): Charles Ives’s piano sonata, composed between 1904 and 1915 and known as the Concord Sonata. Ives layers tonal materials in a work that challenges a single-key hearing.
Igor Stravinsky: A Russian-born composer whose ballets reshaped twentieth-century orchestral music. Stravinsky brought polytonal sonorities to international attention through works such as Petrouchka.
Polytonal chromaticism: Chromatic writing that suggests multiple tonal centers without clearly separating them into simultaneous layers. It blurs the line between polytonality and dense chromatic harmony.
Tonal center: A pitch or chord perceived as the main point of tonal stability in a passage. Polytonality depends on listeners recognizing more than one center.
Three Places in New England: Charles Ives’s orchestral set, composed between 1903 and 1914, depicting American places and scenes. Its overlapping musical layers include passages with competing tonal centers.

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