Tonalities

I was giving a guest lecture on reputation management in Uusikaupunki last Friday. The director of commerce from this pittoresque town gave a lecture on managing the brand of a town. She used an interesting term "brand tonality" to denote the impressions, invoked by a particular brand.

When I heard the word tonality, attributed to a particular brand, I was reminded by what Antonio Strati, perhaps the first authority on organizational aesthetics, has called "invoked knowledge", a type of knowledge which is lived by a person when being involved in a particular context. For organizational scholars, the notion of "invocation" is valuable, as it makes the researcher recognize the texture of organizing. I recall my first experience, entering the electronics laboratory of the Helsinki University of Technology, in my very first semester. The emotions, invoked by the smell of burning tin, in a cement bunker in a basement, turned into immediate soul-searching: is this engineering thing really something I want to do with my life? The textures, smells, sounds and images in the electronics lab environment had reminded me of my high school woodwork classroom, a subject which I hated in a profound way.

Brand tonality is a nice metaphor, I think, because music affects us in the same, immediate, personal manner. The tonality of a piece, which I would summarize as the harmonic background context in which melodies are presented, affects the hearer in a profound, yet often implicit manner. If a town has a pleasant tonality to its brand, it manages to grab the potential inhabitant in a very personal way.

Tonality is characterized in the Wikipedia in the following way:

"Tonality allows for a great range of musical materials, structures, meanings, and understandings. It does this through establishing a tonic, or central chord based on a pitch which is the lowest degree of a scale, and a somewhat flexible network of relations between any pitch or chord and the tonic similar to perspective in painting. This is what is meant by tonality having a hierarchical relationship, one triad, the tonic triad, is the "center of gravity" to which other chords are supposed to lead. Changing which chord is felt to be the tonic triad is referred to as "modulation". As within a musical phrase, interest and tension may be created through the move from consonance to dissonance and back, a larger piece will also create interest by moving away from and back to the tonic and tension by destabilizing and re-establishing the key. Distantly related pitches and chords may be considered dissonant in and of themselves since their resolution to the tonic is implied. Further, temporary secondary tonal centers may be established by cadences or simply passed through in a process called modulation, or simultaneous tonal centers may be established through polytonality. Additionally, the structure of these features and processes may be linear, cyclical, or both. This allows for a huge variety of relations to be expressed through dissonance and consonance, distance or proximity to the tonic, the establishment of temporary or secondary tonal centers, and/or ambiguity as to tonal center. Music notation was created to accommodate tonality and facilitates interpretation."

In a paper (read it here), forthcoming in the Journal of Organizational Change Management, John Sillince, Virpi Hämäläinen and I explore organizational change through the notion of this tension and resolution in music. The paper is motivated through a willingness to find an alternative to the popular belief that organizational change is painful, best achieved through fear, violence and manipulation.

Yesterday's tonalities

Yesterday was a day of pleasant tonalities. My friend and comrade in arms had his 40th birthday. A close circle of friends was invited to their summer cottage, where a tent had been raised in the garden overlooking the lake, a gourmet chef preparing a four-course meal. Talk about tonality.

As my own family was still recovering from the flu, I had to contend with a very brief visit, driving back in time to put the kids to bed. The pleasant, welcoming company, beautiful surroundings, gourmet food, and several bottles of Jallu made me really sorry I had to leave.

Yet, when I arrived home, put the kids to bed and took some time to relax on our balcony, I was awarded by another kind of pleasant tonality. A mist was slowly descending, bringing with it a pleasant spring scent and a magical low light. The birds were singing, and I had a nice Chimay on the balcony. I did not bother to take a picture, but the mood was a little bit like the one in this picture taken in our holiday at the Azores a couple of years ago.

Little tonality, lots of volume

As the time elapsed from by last blog entry communicates, the last few weeks have been characterized by moments blurring into a chaotic discord, with little discernible tonality. May is always like this, but add to this a family member defending her PhD, two small children and the flu season, lots of variables have to be managed.

I had also managed to catch the flu, and was fearing how I would be able to deal with the three long guest lectures that had condensed themselves into last week. I had been traumatized by one particular guest lecture where a group of middle aged men from the construction business wiped the floor with me in a discussion about participation in the strategy process. I felt I lost control of the situation because I could not use my voice to control the dynamics in the room. I was pleasantly surprised as things did not turn violent in any of the three engagements last week. Indeed, I think it may even be easier to appreciate the dialogical aspects in a lecture when one can not rely one's ability to control the discussion.

And finally: Some de facto tonalities

Some great music has been published during the last few weeks. My favorite band Rush has published Snakes & Arrows which is their best album in a decade. There is joy in the their playing. The lyrics are sincere and smart at the same time. There are even a number of catchy choruses, which you don't typically expect from a prog rock band. Cynics may frown upon phrases like

"We can only grow the way the wind blows
On a bare and weathered shore
We can only bow to the here and now
In our elemental war

We can only go the way the wind blows
We can only bow to the here and now
Or be broken down blow by blow"

or

"In the sweetest child there's a vicious streak In the strongest man there's a child so weak In the whole wide world there's no magic place So you might as well rise, put on your bravest face" I hate the tendency that rock lyrics are labeled naive or un-cool if they try to convey anything beyond the micro.

Another great recently published album: Fear of a Blank Planet by Porcupine Tree. It's a textural masterpiece, which confidently guides its listeners from mellow psychedelia to the borders of trash metal and back.

While the joy of Rush's playing as a band on their new album has been something of an affirmation of life for me lately, a particular joy in the PT album is the work of the drummer Gavin Harrison. While the dystopic mood of the album is characterized well by lyrical passages such as

X-box is a god to me A finger on the switch My mother is a bitch My father gave up ever trying to talk to me

Don't try engaging me The vaguest of shrugs The prescription drugs You'll never find A person inside

Harrison plays with such ferocious joy and inventiveness that I felt like jumping up and down in exhilaration. Go listen yourself at http://www.porcupinetree.com/