Is atonal music dead?

Atonal music certainly is not dead, but the idea that it is the only musical language of this time period that need be explored and expanded is quite stale and dated.

There will always be new tonalists.

Originally Posted by cygnusdei

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.

That is totally correct, but note that I didn't -only- say that the majority of listeners would classify it as atonal, but also that such randomly generated music wouldn't have a tonal centre. Would you classify totally random music as tonal, yourself?

I'm pleased to have stirred up a bit of passion.
Gardener, I am not sure what CPP tonality is so you will have to explain it to me. However I don't think you can say that non-tonality is the "general case" unless you are referring to a very small clique, i.e. people who visit Donaueschingen. I don't think I was suggesting that tonality is the perfect system. It is more that, as you say, in comparison with the audiences that other kinds of music have, it is evident that atonal music will never be an audience winner for classical music.
To place this issue within a broader context, it is also evident (at least to me) that classical music programmes (live concerts, radio broadcasts, cd releases) are dominated by dead European males and this has been the case for a long time. Classical music in general has all the characteristics of a museum artifact. We accept this as normal but this was not always the case. For example, 100 years ago there were far fewer concerts but most live performances were concerned with new works by living composers not with plodding out the usual warhorses. I am not suggesting that this change is the result of composers writing atonal music. However, it appears to me that classical music in general needs to change. I think that this has to be composer led. Composers need to write from where audiences tastes are not from some theoretical or academic starting point. I suppose I am suggesting that atonality is not a good starting from which to imagine the future of classical music.

As some perceptive posts have pointed out you could consider atonality a technique that forms part of the composers pallette rather than a style. And it is true that techniques never disappear they just come and go and come back again before being put back in the bottom drawer for a while. Obviously a composer has the freedom to explore any technique that suits their expressive purposes and their purpose is likely to change over time.
This then brings me to my next point which is about how we should conceive of what we do. Presumably most composers start creating music for self-expression as their first impetus. However it is reasonable to expect that once you get beyond the need just to express yourself, you should aim to communicate. I would expect that most people sign up to a forum so that they can communicate with the like-minded and share ideas. But there is a wider world and one of my concerns is that because tonality is so pervasive in the world, it needs to be any composers starting point if they are going to communicate with the world at large. Perhaps some composers only wish to communicate with likeminded theorists. Personally I wish to reach a lay audience so I find myself more concerned with where they are in terms of their musical understanding. Of course there is plenty of tonal rubbish around. No technique guarantees the value of what you do.

- CPP tonality means "common practice period" tonality. It isn't a really good term, as there's no clear "common practice period" in the first place. Just read it as "major and minor tonality".

- I claimed non-tonality was the general case not in respect of the music actually played, but theoretically, considering all the possible kinds of music that -could- exist.

- One important reason why "classical" music is dominated so much by dead composers today in contrast to 200 years ago is the wide availability of it. Most people in Mozarts time had no clue of what had happened musically in the time before them, as there were no sound recordings and scores weren't distributed widely. You played and listened to the music of your time because that was the music that was most available. When people aren't "forced" to listen to something new, they often tend to be lazy and just listen to what they're already used to. The problem is that a great majority of musicians also support this "museum culture" by predominantly playing music of dead composers. That may not be the only reason, but I think it's an important part. However, I don't want to whine about all the people who don't listen to contemporary "concert music". The audience may be small compared to pop music or even Mozart's music, but it's still significant.

- You speak as if "audience oriented music" and "academic music" are the two only possible ways. But I think the majority of today's concert music (and even a large part of popular music) doesn't strictly fall in either of these categories. Where's the music that is simply there because the composer liked it most personally? Where's the "popular music" that also contains an intellectual approach? What if you write for an audience, but maybe not for a audience consisting of millions of people (say the people who write for Donaueschingen), or the people who write for a -really- small audience of, say, five "target people", or just a single person, themselves? They are all writing for an audience, just a different one. How big must your target audience be to "legitimate" your music? Is a small audience not worth a musical effort? Honestly, if all music was written with the intention of reaching as large an audience as possible we'd have a lot of music that sounds pretty much the same, and a great part of the music I enjoy listening to (well, probably ALL of it) simply wouldn't exist. I'd hate that, really. And you'd certainly be stuck without stuff like the late Beethoven string quartets.

- Also I quite agree with LDunn that our actual concern shouldn't be the future of music, predominantly. We simply don't know what it will be. What we -should- care about is writing great, original music -right now-. Music we want to hear and we want to compose, without worrying whether it will be the biggest success in music mankind has ever known.

- Edit: I didn't see your last post before I replied, so this is about "communicating with your music": What if the music you write is the thing you want to communicate?

Originally Posted by Gardener

That is totally correct, but note that I didn't -only- say that the majority of listeners would classify it as atonal, but also that such randomly generated music wouldn't have a tonal centre. Would you classify totally random music as tonal, yourself?

The devil is in the details. Consider a more simple situation in which you pick at random three tones, and ascertain if they form a recognizable triad (certainly having a tonal center).

Without sacrificing generality, we can fix the first tone as C (generalizable because scale degrees are preserved upon transposition). Total possible outcome = (1)(12)(12) = 144 sets of threes (any one tone may be non-unique)

The following 12 triads are possible:
C E G
C Eb G
C Eb Gb
C E G#
A C E
A C Eb
Ab C Eb
Ab C E
F A C
F Ab C
F# A C
E G# B# (= E G# C)

Therefore the probability of finding any of these relative triads in 3 randomly picked tones is 12/144 or 1/12

But if a 'piece' consists of at least 12 triads (or 36 notes), statistically there is at least (12)(1/12) = 1 recognizable triad. Does it make the 'piece' tonal? The devil is in the details.

As I said, in randomly generated music there will be -passages- that have a tonal centre, and there certainly will be triads that also occur in traditionally tonal music. That doesn't make the piece as a whole tonal. You could build a whole piece out of major chords without having a tonal centre, if you don't connect them "logically". Debussy can't really be called atonal of course since in the background you can still sense forms of gravity towards the tonic most of the time, but his music goes in this direction, where chords, such as major seventh chords are no longer functional chords, but mixtures, like registration on an organ.

As I said, Schönberg and many after him avoided common "tonal triads", because a tonally trained audience is prone to hear almost -everything- as tonal (this is also displayed by the fact that we can hear chords in equal temperament as tonal and even "pure"), so they had to systematically avoid anything that would allow this. This -doesn't- mean a music that has chords built out of thirds is tonal. My question remains whether you'd personally classify, say, a highly aleatoric piece by Cage as tonal, where undoubtedly some of your listed chords will briefly appear.

Even Webern pieces -can- be regarded as consisting of intervals that create tonal centres. Just that the tonal centre changes with every second note.

Additional note: In traditionally tonal music, the tonic is never established with a single chord, but always with some sort of cadence. This doesn't apply to early music (say, pre-baroque) of course, which has other ways of establishing a clear tonality. And it doesn't apply to music of other cultures, where tonality is, for example, constituted by drones.

Further note: And all this is just regarding music written in a 12-tone chromatic system. If you used randomly generated -frequencies- the chance of actual tonal centres would diminish even more.

I honestly don't know. But an elegant distinction would be that there is pure atonality, and then there is tonality, which makes for the rest. And yes, apparently it would include randomly generated music.

Apart from these altogether would be non-tonality (or untonality?), i.e. pitch-independent sound palette. Percussions (cymbals, snare drum) come to mind.

Ho hum, this is still ignoring the fact that stuff like concrete music doesn't even have "tones" at all, or proper "pitches". Sure, there are different frequencies, but a lot of the stuff isn't tuned to A 440 or any of that.

Anyways, with regards to communication, I have to agree with Gardener there as usual and say that it's entirely relative to what it is that you want to express.

As for "there will always be tonalists(!?)" sure, so long as tonality remains popular and in the center of a lot of cultures. Change that, and you change everything.

I really have'em problems with arguments such as these where apparently it doesn't matter the actual will of the composer. If anyone wants to write atonal music they should as well, regardless of what anyone thinks. I'd say that "minding what you write" only matters if you have an objective goal, like incidental music or writing for an X audience.

Likewise, I don't think there's anything wrong with mixing things up. I certainly don't live in an age where you have to shove pieces in strict categories, so I presume nobody else does. What is a piece that is both tonal and atonal? Or even non-tonal and noise at the same time?

You can have your wah-wah funk guitars mixed with 12 tone technique, and then sonata motive-development ala Beethoven in the same piece. What then? Come on, this is an old-hat conversation.

Like I said before, any composition technique and aesthetic is nothing more than preferences and aids to actually write what you want to write. So obviously, none of it is going to die, none of it is going to become "stale" if there's at least one person that does it still, and there always is.

On top of this, there are MANY techniques and there are MANY MANY MANY ideas and aesthetics which aren't 18th-19th-20th century centric-european! Tonality, though popular, is also a million different things.

I would think twice before bunching Tom Jobim with Schumann or Brahms, though they're all "tonal". It's not what it is, it's how you use it.

Look at Hindemith or Bartok's conceptions of "tonality", which are nothing like Arvo Pärt or Steve Reich! Atonality itself is also just as varied, I would never put Pierre Henry right next to Schoenberg, or Cage next to Stockhausen though they're all "Atonal" in many ways.

If you're talking about atonality OR tonality, I think it's necessary to be specific about what it is you're talking about. What for atonality? What for tonality? What composers? What actual techniques, aesthetics?

Process music for example, like Cage's, Ligeti's (though he wrote only one, I think) and Reich's are also "atonal", yet they are done in an entirely different way and with an entirely different aesthetic in mind.

My main problem is not with the labels themselves, it's the mindset that it's necessary to use the labels to imply "out of the norm" things. It's always a rather self-defeating "Us vs Them" basic misunderstanding of music techniques, specially modern, that bother me.

There are a thousand bridges between any technique and the next, if anyone bothers to look. If I want to "communicate" in an idiom which I think people are familiar with, I'd use a given set of aesthetics, but just the same I can mix it up and use many things as well.

It's pretty objective if put this way: Within techniques which have strict rule-sets such as 18-19th century tonality, counterpoint, 12 tone technique, serialism et al, there is potential to develop a good amount of depth, form, whatever. Mixing all of this up, is multiplying the potential a great many times.

Like I said before, it's not what techniques you're using, but how, and why.

PS: I'm getting "aw lolz classical music needs to be tonal again!" vibes from the OP, which is just nonsense. Take a look at the actual academic panorama first before saying that sort of crap. Sheesh. Same for the kid with the the comments about the "Avant-garde." Anyhoo...

It isn't dead, it is dying.

Taking a while to.