dear saro?

I completely hear what you are saying and, of course, there is nothing wrong with staying tonal in one's
entire writing career.

I , too, like you, have stayed tonal for most of my writing until a few years ago.

I really looked at Modal harmony (always staying with the same modes but creating more dissonance within
them to increase the emotional spectrum of the piece of music.

Also, there are many, many different Scalar oriented musics that can be accessed using the 12 tones of Western music.

As an example, if you use Lydian derived from playing all the white keys on a piano from F to F, you get a scale
that goes 1,2,3,#4,5,6,7,8va

This is beautiful because it has the sweetness of a major scale but the augmented 4th gives the scale a bittersweet
feeling as opposed to the sad or more 'blue' feeling of playing in the next successive mode, the Mixolydian.

You probably have already discovered this, but then you can take such a scale and make a simple alteration
to it (as in the case of the Indian Rag or Middle Eastern Maqam that takes the same scale but alters it by flatting
the 7th degree.

1,2,3,#4,5,6,b7,octave (that add an Eb to the white keys)

This is a beautiful scale because it is very exotic and oriental sounding. It has the bittersweet quality of the augmented fourth
but it also has the blue feeling of the flatted 7th)

In my own work, I began to look at moving slightly beyond my modal experiments by finding world music scales that
are , essentially, alterations of the basic modes. I used this approach just because I spent about three years only looking
at Modal harmony and was just adding , simply , to my knowledge base.

I had picked up a modern jazz theory book or two, but I found that the devices that they used sounded, well, 'jazzy' and I just didn't like what I was creating.

So, progressing through scalar orientation, then I began to look at scales that were considered more dissonant by Western modal standards, so I became fascinated by Diminished scales W,1/2,W, 1/2,W,1/2,W, 1/2 or 1/2,W, 1/2W,1/2,W, 1/2.

I loved the music of the Impressionist (especially Ravel who greatly influenced the great jazz pianist Bill Evans who , in turn, greatly influenced Miles Davis's decision to turn away from typical jazz harmony and embrace modal harmony on the great record,
"Kind of Blue" and discovered that he was particularly interested in using 2nds and 4ths (so called 'suspended chords') to
specifically NOT resolve his progressions.

A great trick with this is take anything you've written and for every Major or Minor chord you've used in it, trying substituting
a SUS 2 chord or a SUS 4 chord (1,2,5 or 1,4,5) They are considered suspended harmonies because they have no
third that makes the chord major or minor, This makes the chord ambiguous but it also really frees one up to modulate the
melody of a piece between major and minor as Miles Davis was found of doing.

Okee dokee, that's what I've been working on to get way from typical chord progressions and melodies.

The further away you move from tonal playing, however, the further you move away from mainstream Western tastes.

But there are a lot of very bored Western ears out there who are sick of hearing the same kind of musics all the time.

Otherwise, why the huge rise in math rock amongst Indie rock bands?