Is atonal music dead?

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.

cygnusdei :

Heh...

Quite funny... cause your "by definition" doesn't appear to be that at all! It's your abstract thought really! At least in the way you formated and expressed your first sentence.

Well, isn't the definition of atonal "without tonal center" ? This can be achieved by following strict rules, breaking any of which could compromise the 'atonality'. Thus my 'by definition' of atonality being a very limited palette. Why funny?

Originally Posted by cygnusdei

Atonality is no more a style than tonality is.

So tonality and atonality are both styles! This is what I read here (remember I'm Greek! )

You didn't mention the definition of atonality (which is correct in the strict sense, btw, and I agree), you just said the above, which didn't make sense.

Now with your 2nd post it does!

Strict rules wasn't what "atonality" started out at. It was an idea of liberation from certain boundaries and hierarchies. That later different rules were invented to assist with this kind of composing is irrelevant, as it was merely a tool.

The definition of tonality as "having tonal centres" also is very common, but very ambiguous. How long does a tonal centre have to dominate for the music to become "tonal"? Is a tonal centre that happened "by chance" without intention of the composer enough to create "tonality"? Is every kind of weighting or hierarchy between notes the same as "tonal centres"? Can there be more than one "tonal centre"? Is music only "tonal" if the tonal centres are actually perceived by the listener (and thus subjective)?

It is also incredibly easy to compose music without tonal centres of any kind, which is stylistically completely different from what is usually called "atonal music". You can easily achieve that by use of pentatonic or wholetone scales, for example.

There's so much music that has nothing to do with serialism or even the general sound of the New Vienna School, but which still clearly doesn't strive towards one single gravity tone.

Without a clear definition of what "tonal centres" actually are, we won't get very far.

One further "statistical" explanation: Assume a music where every pitch is randomly chosen by a computer. You have to accept this as the average case. There's a tiny chance something like a Beethoven symphony will be produced and a tiny chance a serial piece will be produced. But if we look at the average output of such a machine and determine whether it sounds tonal or atonal to us, we can easily judge which is the more basic, or natural case. And I assure you, most people (as we're making a statistical example here) certainly wouldn't classify this music as tonal. There won't be tonal centres over the whole piece. Something that resembles a tonal centre may pop up now and then, but it will soon vanish again.

The statistical average of "mindlessly produced music" is not tonal, so any musical creation that is tonal must be a conscious limitation of the possible material.

It is true that many "atonal composers" of the 20th century sought to avoid any hint of tonal centres. But it is a wrong assumption that their music would have become tonal if they hadn't avoided major chords by all costs. But a large part of the listeners are so trained to hear in traditional tonality, that they hear tonality -everywhere-, even where it doesn't exist, unless you try your best to work against it. Schönberg had to write all these fourth-tritone chords because they were the type of chords the audience could hear best outside of a tonal context. If he had used major-seventh chords, a large part of the audience would have heard his music in a context that Schönberg didn't like.

Again: The reason why "tonal sounds" were avoided so much wasn't because otherwise the music would have become tonal, but because the "tonally trained listener" would have heard it as such. (And also, because Schönberg and his fellows were -also- tonally trained and would have easily "slipped" into tonality, if they hadn't tried so much to avoid it (with the exception of Berg, who willingly let it happen).)

I personally think that music is now finally at a state of relative equilibrium, i.e. that composers can do practically do whatever the heck they want and still get away with it. Atonality, tonality, twelve-tone row, tonality, whole-tone, whatever you feel like, is all valid today. That's what I feel.

Originally Posted by Gardener

One further "statistical" explanation: Assume a music where every pitch is randomly chosen by a computer. You have to accept this as the average case. There's a tiny chance something like a Beethoven symphony will be produced and a tiny chance a serial piece will be produced. But if we look at the average output of such a machine and determine whether it sounds tonal or atonal to us, we can easily judge which is the more basic, or natural case. And I assure you, most people (as we're making a statistical example here) certainly wouldn't classify this music as tonal. There won't be tonal centres over the whole piece. Something that resembles a tonal centre may pop up now and then, but it will soon vanish again.

Definition is a tricky thing because implications follow it. In this case you are alluding to a consensus approach (using a panel of observers) to ascertain (a)tonality. I believe this is very useful for a lot of things, including determining the value of a piece of music (by way of public reception). But I don't think it is necessary to resort to consensus to define (a)tonality. If anything the very same program used to generate the random samples can run an evaluation algorithm, thus providing objective, unbiased statistics.

Just to say what I always seem to say, since I enjoy repeating myself more than goddamn Philip Glass, no style dies. No aesthetic dies.

Shit just goes out of fashion, but that doesn't mean you can't revive it. Audiences? Bleh, if it were for them we'd rather all be writing the next pop-hit, rather than even talking about atonality!

Not that there's anything wrong with pop.

Originally Posted by gms5287

Avant-garde is a relative term, there's nothing concrete about it at all. Rite of Spring was avant-garde when it premiered, then Boulez was, then Philip Glass and Steve Reich. Avant-garde has no meaning, as does "atonal". I agree with Gardener, I hate that word.

I knew that someone would get me up on that one. I meant avant-garde in todays context. Particuarly (and i said this),

nonchalant whistling while driving a car recorded in a stunt drive facility

seems to be the norm when people compose 'avant-garde' music TODAY.

Sounds are Sounds. Music is Music.
Ordering sounds from A to Z to make a soundtrack, is not music. It is a sound effect reel.
Ordering notes from B - Q, back to A and down through to 9...that, though it would sound odd, is music...because there would be defined pitches.

Music IS sound, they aren't exclusive...

Is all sound music? Eh, that's all opinion and I'm not in the business of making absolute boundaries for an art form. I hear music when I walk around my university and hear construction workers working on whatever. Others hear music in ambient sounds as well. Are bird calls music? I think so.