All forms that we have ever known ... have always been conceived in tonality, that is, in the sense of a tonal magnetic center, with subsidiary tonal relationships. This sense, I believe, is built into the human organism; we cannot hear two isolated tones, even devoid of any context, without immediately imputing a tonal meaning to them. We may differ from one another in the tonal meaning we infer, but we infer it nonetheless.

What tonal meaning, if any, could be inferred from the secondhand music all around me? The tones of the various appliances to which I was listening were a study in misalliances; they certainly didn't all go together, but I was hearing them together nonetheless. What this music means as an accompaniment to a day in the office -- or a night in bed, for that matter -- is worth considering.

NO other artistic medium moves us the way sound waves do, and in that regard music's meaning is emotional, in the word's original sense. The languages of music and emotion are remarkably similar; indeed, the link between musical mode and emotional mood has been the subject of philosophical inquiry and censorious dogma for centuries. Certain modes of music were to be kept out of Plato's ideal State because they evoked sorrowful or ungraceful or indolent feelings (Socrates: "When modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the State always change with them"). Saint Augustine feared the power of music to overwhelm the spiritual message of the hymns it accompanied, and this fear led the Church to pronounce certain musical modes -- and even certain melodic intervals -- dissonant and unlawful. Soviet censors, too, were notorious: they tried, for example, to keep Shostakovich's lugubrious dissonances (and their political overtones) in check.

The musical mode considered least dissonant (and thus most standard) in our Western tradition is the major mode, which is often equated with positive emotions, such as happiness, triumph, and love. The scale upon which the mode is based -- do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, do -- is a sequence of intervals (tones and semitones) that sounds very natural to Western ears as it moves familiarly up and down toward resolution on do. Stop in mid-scale, though -- say, at fa or la -- and you feel the need to continue. What's happening is that the musical intervals do-fa and do-la represent suspended motion; they demand resolution without supplying it. Resolve this tension in the expected manner, and the result is a confident and happy feeling of coming home.

Take a simple melody we all know -- "The Star-Spangled Banner." The mode is major, and the opening can be expressed as follows:

Oh -- oh say can you see

It's a jolly little ditty: unambiguous and unsurprising. Notice that mi is most important to the melody's movement; it seems naturally to pull the melody along. That natural movement translates into the melody's positive emotional meaning.