Polytonality Is Not Free Of Controversy

As with most new techniques or trends, polytonality was not free of controversy. An important group of composers and scholars defended the idea that “most polytonality exists only on paper.” This, due to the incapability of the human ear to separate the different tonalities while listening to a polytonal piece. Humphrey Searle states that “the result is always heard as a unity, and not as a combination on equal terms of two distinct tonalities.” Nevertheless, more than a decade later he will slightly contradict himself when, in reference to polytonal composition in more than three keys, he wrote, “this is because the ear will always try to relate the sum total of the sounds it hears to a definite tonal basis; it is only really possible to listen to and distinguish between two separate tonalities at once.”
In the same regard, Paul Hindemith asserts that polytonality is just a catchword from the post-war. As a compositional tool, he claims that it is “very entertaining for the composer, but the listener cannot follow the separate tonalities, for he relates every simultaneous combination of sounds to a root—and thus we see the futility of the

Rudolph Reti wrote, “the main weakness of the term, therefore, lies in that it conceives tonality as identical with key, rather than in its wider aspect as a tonically unified