Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner How many people genuinely like atonality\no sense of key?

Another inaccurate generalization, most especially the bit about "foreground intervals". It may be more accurate to Webern in some respects, but not Schoenberg. And the use of "tonal coherence" is a somewhat poor choice of words. I'm sure the writer means "not coherent in terms of traditional tonality" (it's a difference of musical syntax, duh!) but it could also be interpreted as meaning that Schoenberg didn't compose coherent musical works, which is so far from the truth it isn't even funny.

P.S.: I don't want this to turn into a pro/anti Schoenberg thread (no one is going to be switching sides anytime soon), so I'll just reiterate my genuine love for much post-tonal (including atonal) music.
P.P.S.: If anyone is curious how the concern for motivic saturation led from free atonality to the 12-tone method, please read George Perle's "Serial Composition and Atonality". And yes, I have a music degree. Sorry, that's two. Soon to be three.

Interesting graph, thanks! Apparently a tritone is far from teh most disonant interval, and is in fact only slightly more disonant than a major second. What distinguishes it is that it's surrounded by such consonant intervals a half step to either side. Minor second seems by far the most disonant interval in western tonality which would jibe with intuition as well.

I take my mortarboard off to you!

p.s. Does a postgraduate certificate count?

premature post :p

Sure, why not? And to you and everyone else, my intention was not to brag, simply to give a gauge of my qualifications. I guess I'm rather passionate about post-tonality (including atonality), which seems to be dismissed by a fair amount of musicians.

Not by me.

No, and I'm truthfully very grateful for this.

Just as I like some tonal pieces and not others, so I probably like and dislike various pieces not based on keys. However, I'm not very certain what is correctly called atonal and what isn't. If things like Jarrett's fifth track on Radiance, Mary Lou Williams' "Fungus Among Us", much of Frank Bridge's piano music and Ives' piano pieces are "atonal", then I like atonal music. However, I do not like music by most of the famous "atonal" composers mentioned in this thread. Therefore I most likely react to atonal music in the same way as I do to tonal music - mostly through properties other than harmony.

Ted, I can't say I can think of any atonal Bridge. Mary Lou Williams??

I was taught and understand, this may interest you Janus, that atonal came out of Wagner. His music holds back the perfect cadence until the ultimate end, often after several hours - that's how it works; totally refusing the resolution the audience seeks until the last bars.

Those who followed figured the next logical step must be to expunge the tonic chord altogether. IMO the 19th century idea of musical progress (mirroring the sciences) was wrong. It was only one of many valid directions music could, and eventually did, go. I'm not sure of what relevance all this 'liking' is.

i read something online once about dissonance in guitar playing and that, if used well and not overused, can give the song/piece a lot of character...i havnt heard any of his stuff but maybe it is something like that...

In reply to some suggestions earlier in the thread, there is no way Rautavaara's 7th Symphony, 3rd Movement, is atonal. Neither is most of Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time. It's harmony that's free of the grip of tonality, and when combined with texturalism (made possible by modern technology), I believe these will be the two main elements when the real 21st century movement starts to define itself.

I put the Rautavaara on the list to counter the myth that 12-tone music has to be dissonant and cerebral -- any average art music listener can at least appreciate this movement (it's quite seductive if I do say so). The symphony as a whole is a lot like Berg's Violin Concerto in that the row is constructed specifically to create tonal sonorities, and that it moves into and out of 12-tone organization seamlessly. The sonorities formed by the Rautavaara row are traditional, but their motion/direction is determined by the row and row succession rather than functional harmony. Get a score and do a 12-tone analysis -- it's quite fascinating!
Messiaen uses a variety of pitch organization methods in the Quartet, including lots of modes of his own creation and combinations of these modes (multi-modal I assume one can call this), as described in his "Technique of my Musical Language." Some of the sappier movements (the violin/piano and cello/piano movements, for example) again can resemble traditional tonality in a purely vertical manner, but again chord succession is on the whole not that of functional tonality.
As for what you call "texturalism", I would say I have encountered far too many fellow composers who favor this dimension because they have such a poor understanding of the more traditional "structural" aspects of music (i.e. pitch, rhythm, harmony, counterpoint, etc.). On the other hand there are also composers who are so focused on structural aspects that their textures and orchestration become so bland. Time will tell where the 21st century is going (I neither agree nor disagree with your statement), but one cannot doubt that what were once considered secondary elements (texture and orchestration for example) have risen to a level as great as traditionally structural elements.