A little history

[Parsifal]

The whole argument, here, is silly.

+1

[Mahlerian]

You're telling me you see no distinction between a classical piece where every section closes on a perfect cadence and Schoenberg dodecaphony?

For god's sake, I just said that I could do that two posts ago.

The differences are immediately and audibly apparent.  The works use harmony and melody in different ways.  But they both have centers that I can hear and point to as gravitational points in their pieces.

[Parsifal]

So you can't reconcile yourself to the fact that when normal people say a piece is atonal, they mean it has one of those other nontraditional types of tonal organization?

[Mahlerian]

So you can't reconcile yourself to the fact that when normal people say a piece is atonal, they mean it has one of those other nontraditional types of tonal organization?

Who's saying they can't reconcile anything?  I said that I don't hear music as atonal, that I have never heard atonality, and that the term atonal is, as far as I can tell, nonsensical.  It has no relationship to the music it's applied to.  It doesn't indicate any particular kind of harmony or melody, nor even the fact of whether or not the harmony is traditional.

[some guy]

Really guys?

Seriously?

Scarpia, with his "normal" people?

San Antonio with his not caring, over and over and over again about someone else's opinion about something?

Come on. Surely you all have something more substantial than that.

What is it with all this "anyone who has an opinion different from mine should just shut up about it"?

Try this--if you don't like hearing critical views of the term atonal, why don't you just stop reading them? Why does it have to be the people with those views who have to shut up?

[Parsifal]

Try this--if you don't like hearing critical views of the term atonal, why don't you just stop reading them?

You have a point there. I have resolved to stop, but somehow I get pulled back in.

[Turner]

I´m not going to dwell on who has been or is being 'obscurantist' regarding questions and issues here etc. etc., but I´ve ordered the Weber book that was mentioned a very long time ago & hope to give it a fair read-through, time permitting. And l´ll also try to check out if the stated interpretation of it holds.

[Florestan]

I have a radical idea: let's all use the words we want and not tell each other which ones we should or should not use.

Some guy people would find such a world dull and boring. For them, floging dead horses and shooting strawmen seems more exciting than anything else.

You should shut up about it because you have been repeating yourself ad nausueum and have failed to convince anyone.

He's not alone, actually. But Mahlerian at least has a long record of actually discussing, and listening to, music. Some guy on the other hand seems not to be interested in anything else than rehashing his obsessions (atonal is a pejorative term, program music is a hoax, modernism has been persecuted ever since the Fall).

You have a point there. I have resolved to stop, but somehow I get pulled back in.

Hereby I solemnly and publicly resolve to stop. Scout's honor!

[Tulse]

You should shut up about it because you have been repeating yourself ad nausueum and have failed to convince anyone.

I'm convinced. Whilst I do not understand music theory, it is apparent that 'atonal' and 'cacophonous noise' are terms used interchangeably by many.

Ad hom attacks on Some Guy and Mahlerian do not make this go away.

[Parsifal]

He's not alone, actually. But Mahlerian at least has a long record of actually discussing, and listening to, music. Some guy on the other hand seems not to be interested in anything else than rehashing his obsessions (atonal is a pejorative term, program music is a hoax, modernism has been persecuted ever since the Fall).

I don't agree with this. Some guy has plenty to say about music. (Maybe about music you aren't interested in.)

[Tulse]

Welcome to GMG.  You chose one of the more argumentative threads to make your second appearance.

Thanks! Yes, it is no coincidence. The quality of debate and musical appreciation is much better here than on the other main site.

I plan to hang around for a bit.

[Monsieur Croche]

So San Ant has been talking about music for 50 years with people of various backgrounds (trained musicians/composers or not) and everyone knew what was meant when the word "atonal" was used.

OK. Hard to gainsay anecdotal evidence without calling people liars, but the thing is I too have been talking about music for a little over 55 years with people of various backgrounds (trained musicians/composers or not) and no one agreed about what was meant when the word "atonal" was used.

Tossing in my mere multiple decades of experience, my return to school in the late 70's (after conservatory piano performance and a decade working) as a theory and comp major landed me in a large state school in northern California which at the time had a very strong classical music department.  It was arch conservative only in what is needed and demanded by the craft, while for the rest it was fully up to date, progressive at that, and very on top of what was current, and forward looking. 

There, the profs all disliked the conventional term Atonal for the many reasons stated in this thread, that:
it is literally a misnomer;
it is in the negative;
it barely and too loosely applies and does not truly differentiate anything much specific that is actually helpful.

-- all that both in the textbooks and from the profs in class. Many clarifications had to be given to dispel a truckload of deep-seeded misconceptions about the term, the text containing, virtually, admonishments as to How & What Not To Think Of IT. 

These were not backwater teachers; they were actively working and performed contemporary composers as well as teachers (one who later won a Pulitzer Prize for classical music), nor were their students crudely ill-prepared rubes. The concern over a fully applicable and clear definition of atonal has to be different depending upon where one trained. 

Later, I met numbers of European musicians 10 to 20 years younger than me who had grown up in a different place and slightly later time enough, say, to hear Prokofiev et alia and 'all that' as 'just more normal music' vs. 'difficult.'  They told me the subject of Atonal was treated with similar attention and care in its initial presentation to them as I had experienced.  (This all at a time when set theory was in use and had barely just been 'defined.')

Chronologically close enough in sync with the era when I went through undergrad and grad levels, San Ant's saying he has never been through any such kerfuffle re Atonal in his training is literally news to me, i.e the first time I have heard it from any of my peers (who had studied at various and sundry; Juilliard, Curtis, The Conservatory of the Hague, Royal College of Music, others.}  All those varied musicians, Americans and Europeans, had similar experiences when first confronted with "atonal" at the undergrad level, and some as late as the late 90's. 

The problem with anecdotal evidence is that it's anecdotal.

Yeah, that.  Perhaps if I had managed to acquire 250 to 300 professional musicians as acquaintances (vs. ca. 200), I might have had a higher probablity of hearing of like experiences to that which San Ant had.

That is, I understand perfectly why Mahlerian criticizes the term.

Indeed.  A lifetime of study and contacts within the professional community has yielded many repeats of all and more of, not Mahlerian's personal complaints -- but instead those are the cumulative plural complaints as compiled through the reading of many theory texts, contacts including teachers, professors, and uni/conservatory students.  {Mahlerian is just reporting the accumulated historic news on this wide consensus of opinions on the word, the shortcomings of the word as coined, its lack of much effective usefulness as it stands.

"Don't kill the messenger," and "Don't shoot the piano player."  ~  Please, we need the messenger as usher and the pianist as musician to perform both serial-tonal and non-serial atonal music at your funeral.

I can not think of one other music theoretic term of definition that is inherently pejorative, nor any other neologism that is such a patent misnomer so sloppily widely applied to anything from Wagner to Boulez and beyond.  Among many of the complaints I've heard repeatedly voiced is, "It should really be replaced, but since it has been in place so long we're probably stuck with it." (More a hopeless wail, really.)

As to that joker wild card some clown laid down on the table re: 'normal' people using the word however they wish (Humpty-Dumpty - like), well, ha ha freakin' ha, do give us all a break. That's like trying to shift the discussion, its participants and observers in this thread from a music discussions site to a sort of Lumpen Land (there, maybe filled with that audience the British conductor spoke of, "They know nothing of music, but they do love the noise it makes.")  When, via fora, I read some allegedly well informed person say the double inverted fugue in the Stravinsky Symphony of Psalms is atonal, he is either off his rocker, orrrr, he means Atonal -- as Some Guy put it -- "Not your grandma's tonal anymore."  Another had stated "Prokofiev is atonal." there again, off their rocker -- or "Not your grandma's Tonal anymore?  (I've never heard or read of Prokofiev -- any of it -- being any kind of atonal.)

The term is in place.  Rather than snippily advise another member to 'just not read this thread,' it might do better for the thread and the world at large if that person instead just stopped using the word atonal until they cared to make enough mental effort to use it in its apposite varied applications -- at the least when participating in a thread, and that will require of them using it more accurately with all the subset conditionals it has which have it covering Wagner through the present.  At least one would think they would have sense enough in an environment where people have signed up to discuss music with moderate intelligence and clarity, and in that context their only means of so doing via the written word....  Its kinda like, "You Must Be This Tall To Ride This Ride."


Always best regards.

[aleazk]

Last time I used the term atonal was ten years ago and before studying music theory... I used to think that Prokofiev was "very (?) atonal" LOL

[millionrainbows]

Mahlerian's usage of the word is within accepted definitions - tonal refers to functional harmony not simply all music with a central tone.  Modal is the common term there.  Now, I think he is overly restrictive in what he terms functional harmony - most Jazz and popular music styles derived from it use functional harmony and are therefore tonal.  All of this is a gray area as theory is extracted post ante from existing musical styles.  Renaissance music is a gray area, sort of pre-tonal / modal where you do have cadential formulas that dont appear in Medieval music and form the basis of Baroque styles.  Then there are modal 20th century pieces, like Miles Davis' So What which uses triads and 7th chords but with no harmonic function, just to outline the dorian mode.  Then you get into terms like pandiatonic to describe alot of neoclassical stuff like Stravinsky where diatonic scales are used without any regard for traditional harmony.   While the narrow theory definition is legitimate, most people casually use the word tonal to describe anything that seems to audibly pull to a central pitch, which is fine for most purposes

I agree that "tonal" is not useful as a precisely defined term, so it becomes necessary to use it in a general sense, as pulling to a central pitch. It follows that "atonal" is just as general: as music NOT pulling to a central tone.

[Monsieur Croche]

I agree that "tonal" is not useful as a precisely defined term, so it becomes necessary to use it in a general sense, as pulling to a central pitch. It follows that "atonal" is just as general: as music NOT pulling to a central tone.

Ah-hah. Now I understand, the harmony from the early-mid baroque through the Common Practice era is Amodal music!

[millionrainbows]

...I don't hear music as atonal...I have never heard atonality, and...the term atonal is, as far as I can tell, nonsensical.  It has no relationship to the music it's applied to. 

I don't hear 12-tone music as being tonal, except in certain cases, such as Dallapiccola and Berg, in certain places, and those only 'hint' at tonality.

Works I do hear as definitely atonal:

Schoenberg: Pierot Lunaire, String Trio, Violin Concerto, Piano Concerto, Erwartung, Suite for Piano op. 25
Berg: Lyric Suite, Wozzeck
Webern: Symphony, Bagatelles

I don't see how any of these works above could be called "tonal," and any connection would be nonsensical, involving some sleight-of-hand tonal analysis bordering on the absurd.

It doesn't indicate any particular kind of harmony or melody, nor even the fact of whether or not the harmony is traditional.

Again, "atonal" is a general, exclusive term; it doesn't have to define a particular kind of harmony or melody, but only denotes the absence of tonal harmony based on a harmonic hierarchy. Music with this absence is immediately and easily recognizable by 99% of listeners.

[Mahlerian]

I don't hear 12-tone music as being tonal, except in certain cases, such as Dallapiccola and Berg, in certain places, and those only 'hint' at tonality.

Works I do hear as definitely atonal:

Schoenberg: Pierot Lunaire, String Trio, Violin Concerto, Piano Concerto, Erwartung, Suite for Piano op. 25
Berg: Lyric Suite, Wozzeck
Webern: Symphony, Bagatelles

I don't see how any of these works above could be called "tonal," and any connection would be nonsensical, involving some sleight-of-hand tonal analysis bordering on the absurd.

Sorry, I don't hear it.  I can hear complex harmonic relationships, shifting centers, melodic/harmonic interaction, and so forth.  I can't hear atonality in any of those works.

This is not to say I hear tonality, of course.  Tonality requires functional triadic harmony and the specific hierarchical relationships of the major and minor scales, and the works cited above consistently employ the full chromatic alongside non-triadic harmony.

But I can't hear atonality in them, and I certainly can hear centers.

Again, "atonal" is a general, exclusive term; it doesn't have to define a particular kind of harmony or melody, but only denotes the absence of tonal harmony based on a harmonic hierarchy.

If that were true, then atonal would be correctly applied to pre-Baroque music as well as pop/rock music.  This isn't the way the term is used.

[millionrainbows]

Ah-hah. Now I understand, the harmony from the early-mid baroque through the Common Practice era is Amodal music!

Well, "modal" music was based strictly on melodic formulas, had no harmony, and no function: only linear melody, so I guess you could say that as a gross generalization.

[millionrainbows]

Sorry, I don't hear it.  I can hear complex harmonic relationships, shifting centers, melodic/harmonic interaction, and so forth.  I can't hear atonality in any of those works.

I can hear complex harmonic relationships in those works too, but that's not tonality: that's relative. There is no underlying, system-wide "deep" system of tonality apparent.

You will never hear "atonal" music or 'atonality', except as an absence of tonality.

This is not to say I hear tonality (in those works), of course.

And this is because you have a strict definition of tonality, which you state:

Tonality requires functional triadic harmony and the specific hierarchical relationships of the major and minor scales, and the works cited above consistently employ the full chromatic alongside non-triadic harmony.

Indian raga has no harmonic functions, but I hear it as being very, very tonal. The same with minimalism.

But I can't hear atonality in them, and I certainly can hear centers.

You will not ever hear any music as being "atonal" except as it is an absence of tonality.

By the general Harvard Dictionary definition, you are hearing tonality if you hear tonal centers sustained through time long enough to be attributable to a tonal hierarchy in place.

But all I hear (in those works) is momentary, instantaneous, local tonal points: not system-wide, deep tonality which comes from an hierarchy.

If that were true, then atonal would be correctly applied to pre-Baroque music as well as pop/rock music.  This isn't the way the term is used.

"Atonal" is not meant to be applied as an identifier or descriptor, only as an exclusive term, so your hypothetical example is not applicable. You will not ever hear any music as being "atonal" except as it is an absence of tonality.

[Mahlerian]

Indian raga has no harmonic functions, but I hear it as being very, very tonal. The same with minimalism.

Explain the "deep, system-wide system" of tonality in this, if you can.

https://www.youtube.com/v/6V1hokSS4TU

You will never hear "atonal" music or 'atonality', except as an absence of tonality.

And, like I said, I have never once heard that in anything, if I am using your definition of tonality.