Ridiculosity in Music

EKen132, you didn't just make a mokery at atonal music. You made a mokery at poorly organised music. You have different complex time signatures. You have no thematic material. You jump registers, extreme differences in dynamics, etc.

Good atonal music doesn't ignore all principles of music. They actually become more important because you do away with tonal organisation.

It's very hard to judge atonal music fairly. The lack of tonal organisation is very confusing and disorientating. Also, most of these composers don't just stretch tonal organisation but also other types of organisation. This is probably the reason why you assosiate the strange things you did in a piece that was supposed to be about atonality.

You could also make a piece that is a mockery of tonal music. Maybe I should do that.

I know this composer that wrote a 12 minute 40 seconds fugue that has only 74 measures. Yeah thats a lot of seconds per measure. His subject is one measure and is repeated 72 times in the whole piece. Plus this happens in all kinds of typical baroque contrapuncal structuring. Actually the music isn't truely atonal because it is not 12 tone and does apply cadences at some point. It's just music with such a high amount of borrowed chords/notes that it becomes tonally so disoriented that there is no tonic to speak of. Almost the whole piece is 'roving harmony'.

The same composer also wrote fugues of 50 minutes, extremely complex.

The border between music by composers like Reger, Busoni, Liszt, Scriabin and truly atonal music is very blurry. Saying that atonal music needs to be serial or twelve tone seems not that far off.

Atonal music needs to be serial?! No it doesnt. is Xenakis serial? - no. is Lutoslawski serial? - no. is Schoenberg's Ewartung serial? - No. Atonal music just needs to be structured carefully and intelligently, just like any music. Atonal merely means the absence of a key centre. a piece does not need to be serial to achieve this. you could easily write an atonal piece with no f sharps, therefore not 12 tone.

Atonal music needs to be serial?! No it doesnt. is Xenakis serial? - no. is Lutoslawski serial? - no. is Schoenberg's Ewartung serial? - No. Atonal music just needs to be structured carefully and intelligently, just like any music. Atonal merely means the absence of a key centre. a piece does not need to be serial to achieve this. you could easily write an atonal piece with no f sharps, therefore not 12 tone.

a minor correction: serial does not mean 12-tone.

dodecaphonic means 12-tone.

serial music means that the composer used an organized series of notes as his prime compositional material.

For example, there is a Copland quartet that uses a 13-note series, some late Strawinski that uses 7 and 8 note series.

When one uses very short series, the better term would be cellular music.

As an added note, I happen to not be fond of the term "atonal". It means nothing. It means "not tonal". Most of Debussy is "not tonal". Strawinski's Le Sacre du Printemps is "not tonal". Berg's Concerto à la memoire d'un ange is "not tonal".

I find it so amusing that all non-tonal music is lumped together into this one unique category: atonal.

In its strictest definition, music that avoids the use of a subdominant is "atonal". For music to be "tonal" by strict definition, it must have a relation of subdominant and dominant to tonic. Again, I would like to underline that this is by the very STRICTEST of definitions.

Now I challenge all those who hate "atonal music" to listen to the soundtrack to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, tracks 9 and 10 on the original release disk (I think it's just the last track on the expanded disk) and tell me that that isn't beautiful! By any definition, that is not tonal music.

Oh yes daniel please do. PDQ Bach is very humorous. Plus he is a very good composer. I think you should definately try and get his 1712 overture (ya know 1812 by Tchaikovsky). That is one of my favorites. PDQ Bach is actually not a real person. The real composer is Peter Schicklie. You will still find everything under the name PDQ Bach because that is like his trademark name. There is an entire story that goes along with it. You might try to find a couple of his cds at borders or something like that. :ninja:

Not fair! I can't see the images :D