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I think it would be fair to say that Serialism is dead. That avenue has been explored to great extent by Stockhausen, Boulez, Nono, Babbitt and others, and has been proved to be a rather dead end. That is not to say that good music has not been created along this journey: Boulez's 3rd sonata and Structures are two of my favourites.
Atonality, on the other hand, has such a loose definition that it might be fair to say it has never been alive. It is difficult to really address where functional harmony ends, and "non-functional" harmony begins. It was a gradual phasing process - most people cite Wagner as the biggest exponent of this, but even with Schubert, the utilisation of major and minor tonality as interchangable, and remote key relationships differs wildly from the rigours of Bach.
The difficulty with all of this is trying to find a definition of tonality itself. How far does the concept extend? Most of the music of Stravinsky does not have conventional functional relationships (if it does he is making a point, usually), but major and minor chords are all there. If tonality is merely the perception of major and minor, then traces of it can be found in the swirling textures of Schoenberg. If it is more specific, the idea of a key center/heirachy, with tonic and dominant homing points, then this scores Schoenberg off the list. But where does Hindemith's Ludus Tonalis fall? Ultimately, we are stuck putting composers into boxes. With the vibrancy of expression in the 20th century, most of the time it is difficult to generalise, even within one era of a composer's career, or even a single piece.
So if the basis of tonality is causing us problems of definition, then maybe we should be looking to rid ourselves of its very foundation - the perfect fifth. This was the sound that Pythagoras saw as being most perfect, and from it constructed the first true chromatic scale. But why divide the octave into 12? Why not some other number? And once this is done, once a piece can be written and performed for an instrument that divides the octave into some other number, we will no longer be able to call it tonal or atonal - it will be neither: a middleground, or perhaps orthoganal to conventional tonality itself.
But nothing can be orthogonal to tonality: it is so ingrained into us as listeners to western music that we cannot but relate back what we hear to something that we have heard before, which sounded "nice". We are faced with the paradox: if music is just sound events organised in time, how is it that there are some "nice" musics, and some "not so nice" musics? How is it that we can be so steeped in a tradition that forces us to walk forwards looking backwards?
Ultimately, composers will write music that expresses the things they wish to express. This will occur in any number of ways, and I hope some new ways will be formulated, but, and this is a significant but, I feel it is crucial to embrace the expressive premises and stanpoints of each individual composer on his or her own terms. Humans are complex things; we make complex art. Surely the only way to view it is in terms of its own complexity, its own idiosyncracity. Each piece of art exists within a context, yes, but it also exists for itself, as a unique kind of experience and formulation. And over simplifying will not solve anything (and I think creates more problems in the long run).
Rather than worrying about the "future", maybe go and find out what's actually happening now. Composers now write some amazing stuff and a lot of crap as well. With sufficient interest in current composition, maybe the "future" of music will be obvious. Maybe it will be not. Personally, I hope it won't be.
L.
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