stability, cohesiveness, form in atonal/chromatic composition

I'm writing my first pieces in an atonal style a la early opuses of Berg and Schoenberg and just want to hear your advice and methods for retaining stability, cohesiveness, and form with such ambiguous harmony...sometime i find the harmony keeps me from writing lengthier phrases, i try keeping an overall focus without too much monotony in motive forms, difficulty bridging together different sections or phrases, and have trouble drawing out a form without being too straightforward (for example, recapitulation but not in the true sonata form sense note for note)...to get an idea for what I'm going for stylistically (finale is giving me trouble as of late), feel free to reference schoenberg's op. 11 which i'm currently analyzing...all advice is welcome!

Well, uh. Form is always a problem if you don't have tonality since form has always depended on keys and modulations. Once that's gone, you just have to start making up your own "form" since tradition doesn't account for atonality.

With the obvious out of the way, I'd suggest you look into working maybe with 12 tone technique as well as intuitive/free atonality. Remember that length isn't really so important (Webern was a fan of brevity, after all) it's more important that you get down what you want to hear than if it's "stable" or "cohesive", since those two adjectives mean nothing unless we define what stability means or cohesiveness.

In essence, you have to know if you want to work with avoiding tonal elements, such as having chord built on 3rds, otherwise consonant intervals one after another which hint towards tonality. ETC. To really get into the atonal "sound" you have to consider dissonances, specially things like minor 2nds and major 7ths, tritones, etc, as valid intervals that don't need to "resolve" anywhere. In other words, there's no such a thing as dissonance and consonance in atonality, since both concepts are based on specific handling of such intervals. When all is treated the same, any difference beyond the actual quality of the sound ceases to exist.

That's also one crucial element which distances the "sound" from something tonal. The thing is though, that Berg incorporates tonal elements even in his atonal pieces, but the way he does it is different. There is a sense of harmony but it's very precisely twisted in the details so that it's never clear if it's there at all. By Schoenberg you get tons of traditional elements, but again, used in very different ways and contexts. Webern was, from the three, the one that worked purely with intervals the most. Though obviously, the phase of free-atonality is mostly interval work, by Webern it's intensified.

So yea.

Originally Posted by Stevemc90

I'm writing my first pieces in an atonal style a la early opuses of Berg and Schoenberg and just want to hear your advice and methods for retaining stability, cohesiveness, and form with such ambiguous harmony...sometime i find the harmony keeps me from writing lengthier phrases, i try keeping an overall focus without too much monotony in motive forms, difficulty bridging together different sections or phrases, and have trouble drawing out a form without being too straightforward (for example, recapitulation but not in the true sonata form sense note for note)...to get an idea for what I'm going for stylistically (finale is giving me trouble as of late), feel free to reference schoenberg's op. 11 which i'm currently analyzing...all advice is welcome!

The problems you mention are exactly the same ones that Schönberg, Berg, and Webern had, to various degrees, so you're in good company there. Schönberg, for example, never really could leave behind traditional form concepts and wrote atonical pieces that are more or less identical to classical sonata forms etc., even though he managed to free himself of these forms a bit more after he had started to compose with the 12-tone technique. And you'll notice that the pre-12-tone pieces of Schönberg and the early 12-tone pieces of Berg and Webern all tend to be rather short. One reason for Schönberg to start writing 12-tone music was actually that he felt that he needed such a system to be able to composer larger scale pieces as, like you, he felt it hard to keep a large scale piece together without any structural system.

Webern never managed to get beyond really short pieces as he was so demanding of his compositions that every note had to be exactly right and there shouldn't be any "unnecessary" notes at all. I actually heard that he always wanted to write longer pieces and was always troubled by the fact that he just couldn't manage to do so, which in retrospect may actually be one of the great qualities of his work.

And Berg wrote rather short pieces too when he started to write 12-tone music as Schönberg's student, but Schönberg thwapped him on the head (well, not literally) as he thought Berg was trying to imitate Webern too much and he encouraged Berg to be more generous in his compositons and write as tonally as Berg felt the need to. And so Berg slowly started to write longer and longer pieces, partly of course also assisted by the fact that he wrote for operas (Wozzeck, Lulu), which gave him a formal/dramatical foundation to base his pieces on.

In fact, all the three composers of the Second Viennese School felt that songs, or any other pieces with a text as a foundation, were very helpful to them as a formal foundation for their pieces. This applies specifically to Schönberg in his pre-12-tone period. Pieces like "Pierrot Lunaire" or the "Hanging Gardens of Babylon" for example allowed him to compose atonally by ear without a strict system, but had a formal direction and coherence thanks to the connection to the text.

In a smaller scale, like in Schönberg's small piano pieces, such coherence mostly comes from intervallic relationships. In almost every piece of his atonical but not 12-tone period you'll find a dominance of certain intervals or interval constellations which hold the whole piece together. That may be for example a minor third and a minor second in various combinations and inversions in one piece, or (quite typical) combinations of tritoni with either fourths or fifths.

Another structural idea that is rather typical for the Second Viennese School are symmetric passages, in which for example a whole piece develops until the middle, followed by the exact retrograde. You'll find this a lot in Berg pieces, but of course you'll also find more refined variants of such techniques.

There are of course lots of other ways of connecting your material (if you want it to be connected), so be inventive. And SSC is of course very right that first, you should try to define what cohesiveness, form, stability, etc. mean to you.

But I perfectly know your pain. I find it incredibly hard to find the narrow border between an apparent "arbitrary" or even "random" form and an overly simplicistic one.

This is a fascinating thread. Question - as you implied SSC, couldn't you develop the form from another aspect other than pitch. For example, Brian Eno, inspired by Reich's phase music from the 60's and early 70's, treated a recording of Pachabel's canon so that tessitura determined the ritard of the note values. So the bass would have the slowest retard, while the soprano the fastest retard. Eno
did this 1975 analog on his album Discreet Music.

PS. Another thought, and pardon if it isn't clear, hasn't Boulez found ways to write larger forms through serialization of all parameters and/or use of chance operations?
If you can point to composers who have done so, would love to know.

PS. I am assuming you do the above while following the 12 tone system or "avoid" a tonal center.

First off, thank everyone for there input...I'll define my personal interpretation of the terms, keep in mind in reality they all lend to eachother...again, what I find to be the most challenging is having these elements under my complete control in a more ambiguous chromatic language

Stability - Mostly in terms of mood, making sure that mood change does not spike suddenly and constantly, as well as the exact opposite
Cohesiveness - More melodic and motivic, the happy medium between monotony and uncontrolled variety, making sure every phrase, melody, section develops into the necxt comfortably
Form - Not traditional form as SSC misinterpreted (sorry I was not clear), more or less how a book will develop in chapters, simple yet clear change/sections that will contribute to the the piece's overall arch (music is not one rambed diatribe)

just to bank off other things you had to say...at this point my problem isn't so much that 'free chromaticm/atonality' (opposed to 12 tone) is holding me back, rather i'm working on familiarizing myself with a new tonal language...of course intervals are an important factor, and as Gardener mentioned, I am aware of pitch class sets (they're all over Schoenberg's op. 11)...actually what I'm working with are song forms as you said (in fact I'm studying the Hanging Gardens score and some of Pierrot, and analyzed Berg's 7 Early Songs, some of Altenberg Lieder, and critical listening of his op. 2 Four Lieder)

Stevemc90 -

You sound like you are on the right track with the excellent works you are studying. I have been doing a little study of Pierrot -- Der Mondfleck and a few other works. As you probably know it is remarkable how "old" the music is. The counterpoint techniques, the way the instrumental groups serve as choruses or contrasting recitatives remind me of the late Rennaissance styles and Monteverdi -- despite the radically different tonal language (well, the exception being possibly some Gesualdo and a one or two esoteric schools of polyphony - eg Duke de Berry (?) sponsored some wild compositions). So, it seems using the song forms is an excellent idea -- you may want to look at Stravinsky's Agon later on just because of its extensive (and somewhat unconscious) indebtness to the Greek poetic forms (I also believe at this time he did some free arrangements of Gesualdo and extensive review of Monteverdi during this compositional period.) and of course how well Stravinsky takes dances forms and makes them abstract musical structures but yet you can hear its "dance/ballet" roots.

In any case, can't wait to hear what you come up with.

ahhhh no help? i'm beginning to get very frustrated with my progress, i've only actually made it a measure forward since my first post...at this point, any tips on atonal (not 12 tone) composition would be great...i have much more trouble writing contrapuntally opposed to intervalically/harmonically

I mean, Schoenberg did sort of use an atonal form of consonance and dissonance. Listen to the Langstam from his op. 19. Basically, he uses major thirds to represent consonance and minor thirds to represent dissonance, but there sure as hell isn't a V-I in the piece. The climax of the piece is two diminished triads being played simultaneously (minor thirds galore), and the resolution is two augmented triads being played simultaneously (major thirds galore).