Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner I'm confused about atonality

I was just listening to Arnold Schoenberg's Verklarte Nacht, op. 4, and I was stunned at its ethereal beauty. I guess I always associated consonance with tonality and dissonance with atonality. I see now that they are not exclusive to one another.

My question is, what is Schoenberg doing in order to keep the key ambiguous, yet keep the music so accessible?

As I was thinking about this, could something like this be produced by constantly modulating, hence there really is no tonal center?

I'm confused.

-Colin

Verklarte Nachte is actually one of his more tonal pieces.

Listen to Pierrot Lunnaire.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49EGhu9U1dw

Valkartenachte is about as unschoenbergy as you can get. It employs a lot of chromatic harmonies, but it is very much in the category of tonal music. Check out his Six Little Piano Pieces, Op. 19.


And I agree, it's a beautiful piece of music.

ROFL.

Pierrot Lunaire is about this guy, Pierrot, who goes loony looking at the moon (lunair) every night. Each movement describes one of his nightmarish halucinations.

During this movement, he imagines that he is being beheaded. Do you hear when his head gets chopped off 1 minute into the movement? Before that, he is horrified, and the singer is describing his anguish. After that, he's "dead" (remember, it's just a delusion) -- the singer is silent, and the music changes dramatically.

Schoenberg is amazing!
And his Verklarte Nacht is something astounding!
I have an amazing recording of Karajan. I'm not sure with which orchestra, but I assume it's BPO.

Dissonance and atonality don't really go together at all. Unprepared/unresolved dissonance in a tonal piece isn't the same as atonality either. I like it all! Schoenburg's string quartets are my favourite of his pieces (#2 especially)

I like the fourth quartet - one of my favorite pieces of music.

Also check out Dutilleux and Berg for some very skilled use of atonal language.

I'd also highly recommend the Berio Sequenza and the Poem by Arno Babadjanian.

Heck, even Samuel Barber uses some 12-tone ostinatos in the 1st and 3rd movements of his piano sonata.

I think we should certainly differentiate between atonal and 12-tone. The two are completely different, in my opinion. 12-tone music follows a set of rules in which inversions, retrogrades, and transpositions of the original 12-tone row are presented one after another and sometimes simultaneously. Strictly atonal music follows basically no harmonic or melodic rules.

Do tone-rows sound less dissonant than complete atonality?

"Tone row" is just a fancy name for "motive." It's a pattern of notes (i.e. a row of tones) that appears and reappears, sometimes upside down, sometimes backwards, sometimes transposed, sometimes with notes added or taken away, in different rhythmic patterns, and sometimes in some sort of combination of those.

So a "tone row" isn't necessarily dissonant; you can write a perfectly tonal, consonant piece using a tone row, just as you can write one using a motive (which is the same thing).

A 12-tone row, on the other hand, is very different.

That means you have 12 notes (all the chromatic steps), and you have to use all of them at least once, but you can't repeat any until you've used all of the others. (often this applies to harmony and melody, both -- i.e. if you use G in the right hand, then you can't use it in the left hand until all other tones have been played; and vice-versa)

What this implies is that there is no tonic; not one note is more important than the others; "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all tones are created equal."

So the motive, which in Bach's music is diatonic, in Schoenberg's music is completely chromatic.

Sometimes even Schoenberg would stray from the rules regarding the 12-tone row, if the music dictated such.

I think the term was applied backwards by Boulez to Schoenburg - the total (or integral) serialism of Boulez (and we studied some Messiaen piano pieces that employed this technique) comes much closer to complete atonality than Schoenburg et al.

Yeah, a 12-tone row or serialist technique is just a way of "enforcing" that the piece be definitely atonal, and not "by chance" take on some tonal quality by coincidental implication. (as seemed to happen with Schoenberg's later output)

slightly off topic but

a) i'd like to thank everybody for the input inserted here, i'm just starting to study composition and trying to lose all sense of tonality

i was wondering, is all 12-tone music that is perceived as 12-tone music strictly defined as process music, just like music which evolves from a rhythmic cell might be called process music, because that is the attention?

Sort of. Nowhere can a greater definition of "process music" be found than in the music of Steve Reich.

The biggest challenge with process music is to make it actually interesting. I think the most interesting process music I've ever heard was "Dripsody" by Canadian Hugh LeCaine, or that audio/visual work by someone who's name I can't remember but would really love to be reminded of - it started as a little dot on the screen, and bounced around, dividing, to eventually make these really cool prism effects, I think his idea was to actually animate directly onto film reel to achieve this effect back when there were few ways to do that sort of thing.

I'll really owe one to whoever can name this guy for me, I think he is Canadian as well.

wait, I just found his name, it's Norman McLaren!

And the film is called "Mosaic", it's really cool to watch on a big screen!

http://video.google.ca/videoplay?do...0&so=0&type=search&plindex=0