Atonal and tonal music

[Mahlerian]

Eh, it is questionable which of the more modern and contemporary music is considered "classical". Same for Renaissance music for example. There is hardly anything uniting all classical music but there's a family resemblance.

With atonal there's of course disagreement about its use, but very few would consider Debussy atonal for example, which you would lump as "post-tonal" along with 2nd Viennese School etc. under your prescribed definitions.

But why, though?  If you're defining the term in terms of traditional tonality, as per its literal implications, then much of Debussy would fit.  He is in fact cited at Wiki, apparently in reference to a paper called "Tonal Analogues as Atonal Resources and Their Relation to form in Debussy's Chromatic Etude."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atonality

If we want to go the other way and define terms by their usage (prescriptivist rather than descriptivist), then it is clear that over time things which have been considered atonal can later become tonal, as usage shifts away from the labeling of all modern music as such.

[Madiel]

LANGUAGE IS NOT LITERAL.

That's it, I'm done. I have to go to work.

[jochanaan]

Perhaps it's time for a gentle reminder that atonal and serial both have very specific meanings to composers and music theorists.  Atonal refers specifically to music without any hint of a tonal center.  Serial means music based on a specific order or "row" of tones (not written notes necessarily); "12-tone" refers to serial music that uses all 12 possible tones in a row, but it is also possible to use rows of less than 12.

(If anyone can be considered the "father of atonality," it is Franz Liszt, who wrote Bagatelle sans tonalite in 1885.  Also, his Faust Symphony's opening theme anticipates 12-tone serialism, as does one section of R. Strauss' Also Sprach Zarathustra.)

[Mahlerian]

Perhaps it's time for a gentle reminder that atonal and serial both have very specific meanings to composers and music theorists.  Atonal refers specifically to music without any hint of a tonal center.

Once again, I have never heard music without any hint of a tonal center.  Tonal centers appear in any harmonic or melodic collection by the simple weighting of various elements.

This was Schoenberg's objection to the term, it was at the heart of the objections of Berg and Carter and Sessions and so forth.

As a composer, I find that atonal is not applicable to my music, and I don't see it as useful in referring to anyone else's either.

[SharpEleventh]

But why, though?  If you're defining the term in terms of traditional tonality, as per its literal implications, then much of Debussy would fit.  He is in fact cited at Wiki, apparently in reference to a paper called "Tonal Analogues as Atonal Resources and Their Relation to form in Debussy's Chromatic Etude."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atonality

If we want to go the other way and define terms by their usage (prescriptivist rather than descriptivist), then it is clear that over time things which have been considered atonal can later become tonal, as usage shifts away from the labeling of all modern music as such.

Debussy does not qualify because it is not "total chromaticism mixed with non-triadic harmony", which is a very good descriptivist definition you came up with.

[Monsieur Croche]

Wouldn't post-tonal be more apt, though?

Lol, I'm likin' that a  lot :-)

Medieval = Modal/Ante-Tonal
Baroque ~ Classical ~ Romantic = Post-Modal/Tonal
Modern ~ Contemporary = Post Post-Modal/Tonal

There.  Simples.  Leave later generations to muddle out how many 'Post' prefixes they add before a recycled older tag prefixed with yet another 'Neo' rears its head

If anyone would first consider the immense range of harmonic practices within any one of those eras, then think on this focus to a degree of near to bat-shit obsessing on just the Second Viennese School variety of 'Post Post-Tonal,' it pretty much looks like an obsessive hang-up.  If it is a chronic hang-up, then one announcement of the condition suffices, after which it is, like any person's chronic condition, since it is chronic, boring.

With so many composers today, regardless of what vein their music is in, having no care or concern for either 'Tonal' or 'Atonal' as worthwhile terms currently indicating much of anything, it is to be hoped that later, slow and cautious as ever, theory textbooks (amassed data, codified and based upon what composers did,) will revise some terms without anyone losing their grip on discerning one musical vocabulary or M.O. for another.

I would hope for more than a few, this is all a tempest in not a tea cup, but a tempest in the wider and shallower saucer for that tea cup.  I.e. the slightest agitation, and there are waves and spillage :-)


Best regards.

[Keep Going]

This was Schoenberg's objection to the term, it was at the heart of the objections of Berg and Carter and Sessions and so forth.

Philip Glass also objects to his music being labelled as 'minimalist', yet to a wider audience his music will always be labelled as such.

Most important implication: the rules in play for the cognoscenti differ to those for the laymen.

[Monsieur Croche]

Philip Glass also objects to his music being labelled as 'minimalist', yet to a wider audience his music will always be labelled as such.

Most important implication: the rules in play for the cognoscenti differ to those for the laymen.

I agree, but just as anyone on a classical music forum who has signed up to repeatedly discuss things classical has learned the difference between song and piece, I don't think it is expecting much at all that folk don't do not linger or tarry too long in lay land, where, for instance, any piece that evokes romantic notions in the listener is, therefore, "Romantic."

One could think that a bit of learning the terminology and reading it and using it correctly is a usual expectation in and on classical music fora (absolutely no note-reading or formal harmony study required), and along with that understand 'the laity use it this way,' is more than obviously neither clarifying or at all 'useful.'


Best regards

[ComposerOfAvantGarde]

Medieval = Modal/Ante-Tonal
Baroque ~ Classical ~ Romantic = Post-Modal/Tonal
Modern ~ Contemporary = Post Post-Modal/Tonal

Thinking about western classical music in three eras like this does seem to be the least controversial and probably even the most 'correct.' Although I have come across the term 'Common Practice Era' more often when it comes to describing the harmony and tonality of the music from the Baroque-Classical-Romantic periods. Basically Monteverdi would pretty much understand the kind of things Mahler was doing because their music pretty much falls within the Common Practice Era where harmony was divided up into tonic, predominant and dominant functions at the most basic level of understanding.

[Cato]

(If anyone can be considered the "father of atonality," it is Franz Liszt, who wrote Bagatelle sans tonalite in 1885.  Also, his Faust Symphony's opening theme anticipates 12-tone serialism..[/i].)

I still recall Leonard Bernstein, on a broadcast N.Y. Philharmonic concert with the Faust Symphony, calling the opening a "12-tone row," but with a wee bit of humor in the voice.

I am amazed that so many pages have already been produced here! 0:)

Once again, I have never heard music without any hint of a tonal center.  Tonal centers appear in any harmonic or melodic collection by the simple weighting of various elements.

This was Schoenberg's objection to the term, it was at the heart of the objections of Berg and Carter and Sessions and so forth.

As a composer, I find that atonal is not applicable to my music, and I don't see it as useful in referring to anyone else's either.

Very nice: one exception would be the "clustering" of notes for smears, e.g. in Penderecki's Threnody or Utrenja, but as soon as any true melodic or motivic line enters, we are back to at least the possibility of a tonal center...and one listener's ears may hear a tonal center where even the composer did not hear it, or intend it.

Even Alois Haba, who as a theorist advocated for a radical "athematicism" or "non-thematic" music, in his actual creations - including the quarter-tone works - was unable to avoid.

Consider in this context the Nonet of a Haba protege, Jeronimas Kacinskas of Lithuania:

https://www.youtube.com/v/5ZBr_F2oZk8

[Mahlerian]

Very nice: one exception would be the "clustering" of notes for smears, e.g. in Penderecki's Threnody or Utrenja, but as soon as any true melodic or motivic line enters, we are back to at least the possibility of a tonal center...and one listener's ears may hear a tonal center where even the composer did not hear it, or intend it.

True, and one could also cite the exception of indeterminate pitched sound in works mostly consisting of non-pitched sounds, as in much musique concrete, or Ionisation.

Even Alois Haba, who as a theorist advocated for a radical "athematicism" or "non-thematic" music, in his actual creations - including the quarter-tone works - was unable to avoid.

Consider in this context the Nonet of a Haba protege, Jeronimas Kacinskas of Lithuania:

Or the trajectories implied in the music of one of the few composers who embraced the term atonal, Hauer.

[Monsieur Croche]

Thinking about western classical music in three eras like this does seem to be the least controversial and probably even the most 'correct.' Although I have come across the term 'Common Practice Era' more often when it comes to describing the harmony and tonality of the music from the Baroque-Classical-Romantic periods. Basically Monteverdi would pretty much understand the kind of things Mahler was doing because their music pretty much falls within the Common Practice Era where harmony was divided up into tonic, predominant and dominant functions at the most basic level of understanding.

Just as Karl Henning said, to the trained, "Tonal" is that classical era only, the following Romantic era (early / mid / late), already not really and fully 'classical-tonal.'  (i.e. if you have to add new harmonic precepts and definitions, and analyze it differently... something is up!)

Thanks.  I thought the breakdown in three (adding the already in place early-middle-late categories within each as completely serviceable) really does cover it.

For the rest, I was having a bit of a jape at the mundane, yet cleanly clinical, terms like post-tonal, modern/post-modern (I mean just how unimaginative is, literally, "after Modern?")

...cleaning up those three to the more practical
Modal / Tonal / Neotonal would be the clearest and give the cleanest indicators; these would certainly lend themselves to a quicker understanding of an unbroken continuum of the changes in classical music over the centuries vs. a hard diversion or break from one era to another.  (Because, listened to in a particular way, without the terms coloring what one hears and is listening for, there are BiG ChanGeS but no real major diversions or 'breaks.')  It seems no one has a problem with the turnaround of the general musical scenes as instigated by Monteverdi, Rameau, Carl Philip Emanuel Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, Mahler, etc. -- yet....) 

But this proposed terminology has one term already 'taken' ~ nit-picky micromanaging academe has already designated one of the many modern-contemporary harmonic veins as specifically 'neotonal,' (they really could have waited on that one, imho  ) so that term would have to be retracted and another invented to take its place.

What I most sought was to remove any influence of words or terms for the various historic eras, styles and harmonic usages that can and do color the imagination about those terms --  ergo, when first approached, perceptions about the music itself. 

A less than clinical 'color' term can most affect the neophyte when first learning  (A thing correctly learned takes twenty-times less effort and 'drilling' than it does to correct a thing wrongly learned. -- N.B. performers, lol.  There is no ever completely undoing a first impression, is there?)  By calling something 'common practice' it shades the later 'uncommon' as perhaps more difficult, less accessible, or perhaps can imply 'deviant' or 'bad.'

Simile, the lay misunderstanding of that near to egregious misnomer "Atonal."  Atonal was meant to specifically mean "Music without a Tonic Triad as previously used within the Common Practice Hierarchy of Diatonic Chord Function" -- a bit much to ask the less than trained to grasp in one and then keep in mind.  Used on the uninitiated, it seems to have a powerful ability to confound when they first listen to atonal fare! :-)  The proposal of eliminating color terms applies elsewhere: without the deeply emotionally color-infused word 'Romantic,' for example, I think it would make way for a readier access to what more accurately makes romantic music 'romantic,' etc.

For me, the definition of tonal given me by my comp professor works well, always.
"A piece is tonal if it works."


Best regards

[Madiel]

Asking words to be devoid of colour and implication is a completely fruitless exercise. They will take on colour and implication through use, and in a generation or two you will be back where you started.

If one insists on using, say, "neotonal" instead of "atonal" because too many people have concluded that "atonal" music is something to instinctively dislike and avoid, all that will happen is that in 50 years fans of "neotonal" music will be complaining how too many people assume that they dislike "neotonal" music and won't listen to it.

You cannot remove reactions and associations simply by switching words, because it's a complete mistake to think that the reaction or association is an inherent quality of the word you're replacing. The word is merely a representation of a thing. People will continue reacting to the thing.

Bless me, it's all in Romeo and Juliet, but apparently folks don't read that stuff anymore.

[Cato]

"Neo-Tonal" reminded me of a nearly unknown French composer named Avenir de Monfred and his "New Diatonic Modal Principle of Relative Music."

Alexander Tcherepnin and Tibor Serly had other methods of tonality in attempts to "reinvigorate" the concept:

Alexander Tcherepnin's ideas on harmony and scales (often 9-tone ) and on polyphony (he had a variation called Interpoint)
can be found here:

http://www.tcherepnin.com/alex/basic_elem2.htm

Avenir de Monfred had a polymodal method he called New Diatonic Modal: look for a book called The NDM Principle of Relative Music.

Also see:

https://www.youtube.com/v/WEC3928RJ0M

https://www.youtube.com/v/matbVeF2N2s

And then there is Tibor Serly and his Modus Lascivus method, which involves creating scales and polyphonically restricting certain voices only to certain scales, which later in a movement are played simultaneously.  (A simplification: imagine "Section A" using a scale of C-F-B-C, "Section B" uses "C#-D-F#-G#-A-C#", and "Section C" reuses both A and B by playing them on top of each other.

His Concertino 3x3 uses this technique brilliantly.

http://www.amazon.com/Tibor-Serly-Designs-Concertino-Concerto/dp/B000ION68G/ref=sr_1_1?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1310604100&sr=1-1

[Ken B]

This thread is too narrow. All the attention is on "atonal", but what about "music"? I know of no crisp mathematical definition of this term. It prejudices the debate. It has connotations. People react to the word, not the thing in itself. It does not capture all the important aspects of the phenomena. Just stop using it!

[Mahlerian]

Asking words to be devoid of colour and implication is a completely fruitless exercise. They will take on colour and implication through use, and in a generation or two you will be back where you started.

If one insists on using, say, "neotonal" instead of "atonal" because too many people have concluded that "atonal" music is something to instinctively dislike and avoid, all that will happen is that in 50 years fans of "neotonal" music will be complaining how too many people assume that they dislike "neotonal" music and won't listen to it.

You cannot remove reactions and associations simply by switching words, because it's a complete mistake to think that the reaction or association is an inherent quality of the word you're replacing. The word is merely a representation of a thing. People will continue reacting to the thing.

Bless me, it's all in Romeo and Juliet, but apparently folks don't read that stuff anymore.

You're assuming that things do not change over time, while they certainly do.  Audiences today accept more and more of the music of the wild 20th century, and the music of the Second Viennese School, among other things, is certainly on the way to wider acceptance today.

If things progress as they do today, it is not that we will not be hearing the word "atonal" or an equivalent in the future so much as that it will no longer be applied to Schoenberg, Webern, and Boulez (already I see people refusing to put the term on some of Berg's works), whose music will be widely accepted and therefore not considered outside of mainstream tradition.  It will be applied to other things which are seen as threatening to sacred tradition, and lessons that could have been learned from the past are ignored.

Emphasizing the links with tradition that are there in the music, not falling prey to words like atonal which have a simple meaning that is false and a more erudite meaning which is contrary to the simple meaning, would be helpful to understanding and discussing the music.

A rose may be as sweet no matter what the name, but honestly, if you called it manure, no one would think to try smelling it.

[Madiel]

You're assuming that things do not change over time, while they certainly do.  Audiences today accept more and more of the music of the wild 20th century, and the music of the Second Viennese School, among other things, is certainly on the way to wider acceptance today.

If things progress as they do today, it is not that we will not be hearing the word "atonal" or an equivalent in the future so much as that it will no longer be applied to Schoenberg, Webern, and Boulez (already I see people refusing to put the term on some of Berg's works), whose music will be widely accepted and therefore not considered outside of mainstream tradition.  It will be applied to other things which are seen as threatening to sacred tradition, and lessons that could have been learned from the past are ignored.

Emphasizing the links with tradition that are there in the music, not falling prey to words like atonal which have a simple meaning that is false and a more erudite meaning which is contrary to the simple meaning, would be helpful to understanding and discussing the music.

A rose may be as sweet no matter what the name, but honestly, if you called it manure, no one would think to try smelling it.

I'm assuming that things don't change for the express purpose of isolating the effect of a word change, such as the one being advocated.

That tastes change proves the exact opposite point: that keeping the same word doesn't guarantee keeping the same attitudes. In both cases, the attitude is independent of the word.

So if you think you're refuting my argument you are very sorely mistaken.

[Madiel]

PS I very much doubt your reasoning that "atonal" will no longer be applied to Schoenberg. You are locked into a mindset that say the word is inherently a perjorative one.

The history of the word "Impressionism" proves you entirely wrong. It's not that the nasty word was replaced when people started liking Monet. What happened was that the "nasty" word stopped being nasty.

You really don't seem willing to abandon your ideas that language is fixed in this way, and your ideas just aren't correct. Both the literal meanings of words and the associations with those words can completely reverse.

[Mahlerian]

PS I very much doubt your reasoning that "atonal" will no longer be applied to Schoenberg. You are locked into a mindset that say the word is inherently a perjorative one.

I am basing that on the fact that atonal has been applied to many other composers in the past to whom it is no longer applied, as a result of their music gaining greater acceptance.  As I said before, Hindemith, Mahler, Strauss, Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Prokofiev, and Bartok, among many others, all encountered the word applied to their own work (or Mahler would have, had he lived long enough).

The history of the word "Impressionism" proves you entirely wrong. It's not that the nasty word was replaced when people started liking Monet. What happened was that the "nasty" word stopped being nasty.

You really don't seem willing to abandon your ideas that language is fixed in this way, and your ideas just aren't correct. Both the literal meanings of words and the associations with those words can completely reverse.

I do not have that idea.  I am aware of the example of Impressionism, and also Baroque, which was mentioned earlier.  There are also examples of words such as Luddite whose origins are obscure or forgotten but which retain pejorative connotations, so I fail to see your point.  The fact that some words lose their initial negative connotations or meaning doesn't mean that this specific word will.

The former two examples became simple descriptive words which gained other connotations, while atonal remains the fodder of polemics and nonsense written about the supposed decline or subversion of the Western musical tradition.  The fact that it is also used in academic literature to mean something separate only confuses the matter.

[Madiel]

Sigh.

I'm not PROMISING that the word will or won't change meaning. I'm trying to illustrate the lack of guarantee about the meaning staying the same.

And hence the complete futility of your whole exercise in trying to change minds by changing words.