Freedom in experimental music: the New York revolution  -excerpts-

Similarly in the visual arts, Renaissance painters began to organize space into two dimensions through the use of scientific perspective. Although both tonality and perspective continue to enjoy a deep-rooted tradition, they are by no means universally adopted. Each technique simply supplied a focus for unity in form, and such developments represent a small sector of world art. One goes too far in accepting the implication that because tonality is, more or less, supported by the natural harmonic series in terms of consonance and dissonance, it is the natural musical language. Indeed, early tonal music indicates that there was a practice of utilizing a wide variety of tunings and interval sizes. Given this, in the presence of world music, we can understand the ear’s adaptability.  jc

 Hence, timbre corresponds to color, whereas tonality functions like perspective. Though the nature of all music is inherently abstract, tonal progression may have approximated the ideal of visual realism. Perhaps, as Morton Feldman suggests, composers have learned to project images in time: We are taught to think of music as an abstract language--not realizing how functional it is, how related to that other spirit, whether it be literary or a literary metaphor of technique