atonality - History of atonality, Controversy over the term itself, Composing atonal music, Criticism of atonal music

The property of music which is not written in a key. While any music not written in the tonal system, which prevailed between c.1600 and c.1920, might be described as ‘atonal’, the term is most commonly applied to music written in the post-tonal but pre-serial style of Schoenberg's Ewartung (1909) and other compositions of that period.

Atonality describes music not conforming to the system of tonal hierarchies, which characterizes the sound of classical European music between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Atonality usually describes compositions written from about 1907 to the present day, where the hierarchy of tonal centers, in some cases, may not be used as the primary way to organize a work.

The most prominent school to compose in this manner was the Second Viennese School of Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern. However, composers such as George Antheil, Béla Bartók, John Cage, Carlos Chávez, Aaron Copland, Roberto Gerhard, Alberto Ginastera, Alois Haba, Josef Matthias Hauer, Carl Ruggles, Luigi Russolo, Roger Sessions, Nikos Skalkottas, Toru Takemitsu, Edgard Varèse, and others, including jazz artists such as Anthony Braxton, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, and Cecil Taylor (Radano 1993, 108-109), have written music that is described as atonal, and many traditional composers “flirted with atonality,” in the words of Leonard Bernstein.

History of atonality

While music without a tonal center had been written previously, for example Franz Liszt's Bagatelle sans tonalité of 1885, it is with the 20th century that the term atonality began to be applied to pieces, particularly those written by Arnold Schoenberg and The Second Viennese School.

Their music arose from what was described as the crisis of tonality between the late 19th century and early 20th century in classical music.

The first phase is often described as "free atonality" or "free chromaticism" and involved the conscious attempt to avoid traditional diatonic harmony.

The second phase, begun after World War I, was exemplified by attempts to create a systematic means of composing without tonality, most famously the method of composing with 12 tones or the twelve-tone technique.

Atonality emerged as a pejorative term to condemn music in which chords were organized seemingly with no apparent coherence. In Nazi Germany, atonal music was attacked as "Bolshevik" and labeled as degenerate (Entartete Musik) along with other music produced by enemies of the Nazi regime.

In the years that followed, atonality represented a challenge to many composers — even those who wrote more tonal music were influenced by it. The Second Viennese School, and particularly 12-tone composition, was taken by avant-garde composers in the 1950s to be the foundation of the New Music, and led to serialism and other forms of musical experimentation. Many composers wrote atonal music after the war, even if before they had pursued other styles, including Elliott Carter and Witold Lutosławski. After Schoenberg's death, Igor Stravinsky began to write music with a mixture of serial and tonal elements. Iannis Xenakis generated pitch sets from mathematical formulae, and also saw the expansion of tonal possibilities as part a synthesis between sound and science which he saw also in the music of ancient Greece.

Atonal music continues to be composed, and many atonal composers of the late 20th century are still alive and active. However, serial atonal composition began to fade in the 1960s — where, on one hand, aleatoric music, spectral music, and electronic music demanded more and more attention and, on the other, musicians influenced by Eastern mysticism, modality, and Minimalism began writing music based on ostinato patterns.

Controversy over the term itself

The appropriateness of the term "atonality" has been controversial.

"Atonal" developed a certain vagueness in meaning as a result of its use to describe a wide variety of compositional approaches that deviated from traditional chords and chord progressions. Attempts to solve these problems by using terms such as "pan-tonal," "non-tonal," "free-tonal," and "without tonal center" instead of "atonal" have not gained broad acceptance.

Composing atonal music

Setting out to compose atonal music may seem complicated because of both the vagueness and generality of the term. (p.9) However, he provides one example as a way to compose atonal pieces, a pre-twelve tone technique piece by Anton Webern, which rigorously avoids anything that suggests tonality, to choose pitches that do not imply tonality.

Further, he agrees with Oster and Katz that, "the abandonment of the concept of a root-generator of the individual chord is a radical development that renders futile any attempt at a systematic formulation of chord structure and progression in atonal music along the lines of traditional harmonic theory." Atonal compositional techniques and results "are not reducible to a set of foundational assumptions in terms of which the compositions that are collectively designated by the expression 'atonal music' can be said to represent 'a system' of composition."

Criticism of atonal music

Composer Anton von Webern held that "new laws asserted themselves that made it impossible to designate a piece as being in one key or another" (Webern 1963, 51), whereas musicologist Bob Fink has stated that all music is perceived as having a tonal center .

Famous Swiss conductor, composer, and musical philosopher Ernest Ansermet, a critic of atonal music, wrote extensively on this in the book Les fondements de la musique dans la conscience humaine (Ansermet 1961) where he argued that Beethoven was unique in presenting the eternal ideal of the hero, his struggling and victory (the Fifth Symphony) and the typical Western universal ideal of a community of all social and loving humans (the Ninth Symphony) so forcefully and clearly. So the incomprehensible (to Ansermet) modern atonal music, by choosing interval relations seemingly at random, could not achieve such an impact, ethos and catharsis for an audience.

In the historical view, however, neither of the extremes of prediction have come about: atonality has neither replaced tonality, nor has it disappeared. There is, however, much agreement amongst many composers that atonal systems in the hands of less-talented composers will still sound weak expressively, and composers with a genuine tonal gift are capable of writing exquisite works using twelve-tone methods. Serialism itself has been taken up by tonal composers as a modest replacement for the common practice tendencies of certain traditional forms to conform to certain tonal expectations.