" Authenticity, Content, Beauty. Everything that I want and try to achieve in music and that I value in the works of my predecessors and contemporaries can be summed up in these three words.”
Attila Bozay
Decatonality
Decatonality is a system that can already be found in Attila Bozay's second creative period, but from the time he composed the opera Csongor és Tünde, Op.31 to the end of his life it played a major role.
Bozay's decatonality is a ten-degree tonal system that omits two notes from the entire chromatic field which are a tritone apart. The remaining 10 notes form two chromatic pentachords, a tritone apart. Thus Bozay's decatonality consists of six pitch sets and is identical to Olivier Messiaen's mode 7 transposition in terms of its set of sounds.
Bozay sometimes used the tenth degree and often all twelve, but he also used a further reduced version of his own type of ten degrees. He achieved this nine-degree version by omitting the middle note from one of the two five-member clusters. In this way two different types of nine degrees can be formed from the decatonality of a particular tone set. In certain movements of the same work, he would consciously use one type of decatonality, the two types of nine degrees that can be obtained from it, and even a set of tones reduced from the given ten degrees in the direction of both possible nine degrees, thus resulting in eight degrees. And this set of eight notes is already the same as the alternating eight semitone/tone degrees named by Lendvay in connection with Bartók as the 1:2 model scale, Messiaen's 2nd mode, and after Stravinsky as the Doric tetrachord connected to each other at a distance of two tritones.