First of, anyone who says that atonality cannot exist is just playing games with pretending not to understand the distinction between the word and the thing, just like anybody who says that Arabs can't be anti-Semitic because Arabs are just as much Semites as Jews are. The word may not be the ideal choice of terminology, but there's no question - other than in the minds of deliberate jerks - what it refers to.
That said, there is a more accurate alternative term for the same thing, and that is "twelve-tone". In an ordinary major or minor scale, there are 7 tones in an octave, and 5 regular tones that are excluded (this discounts quarter-tones and microtones). A scale is formed by taking one note as the tonic base, and building a selection of other notes around it, using the standard major or minor scale pattern. Pure consonance consists of using only the 7 selected notes, and only in standard harmonic chords. Dissonance consists of using those 7 notes in non-standard ways (for instance, E and F may be part of the same scale, but play adjacent ones together and it's dissonant), and/or in sticking in some or all of the 5 excluded notes as well, in which latter case it's chromatic dissonance, "chromatic" meaning that you're using all the "colors" available, and the chromatic scale is the one with all 12 notes in it.
Use enough chromatic dissonance in your music, and listeners will start to lose the sense of the tonic, the home note. Schoenberg's insight was to do this deliberately, employ all 12 tones completely impartially, and totally erase that sense of the tonic. (And that's why it's called "atonality", Arnold, you berk.)
Schoenberg employed all kinds of rules to prevent a sense of a tonic center from creeping into his music. His basic one was to begin by writing what he called a "tone row", an arrangement of all 12 pitches in some order. You shouldn't have more than 2 pitches in succession that are in the same major or minor scale, for instance, and you had to go through all 12 before repeating any. Of course, in practice it was more complicated than that, but the goal was to be entirely rigid.
What Webern is saying in the article you link to is that, even with that, it's impossible to eradicate entirely the human mind's sense of a tonal center. I'd say that what would be more accurate is that it's impossible to eradicate the mind's search for a tonal center. Which is why 12-tone music, and even more music that aspires to the condition of 12-tone without quite sticking to Schoenberg's rules, is so damned disconcerting to listen to, much more than music with any amount of chromatic dissonance.
Schoenberg's hope had been to train the ear to accept 12-tone as "normal", but in that hope his project was a disastrous, and predictable, failure, but one which caused as much damage in the artistic realm as the equally disastrous failure of Prohibition did in social policy and in real life.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2013-03-06 01:00 am (UTC)That said, there is a more accurate alternative term for the same thing, and that is "twelve-tone". In an ordinary major or minor scale, there are 7 tones in an octave, and 5 regular tones that are excluded (this discounts quarter-tones and microtones). A scale is formed by taking one note as the tonic base, and building a selection of other notes around it, using the standard major or minor scale pattern. Pure consonance consists of using only the 7 selected notes, and only in standard harmonic chords. Dissonance consists of using those 7 notes in non-standard ways (for instance, E and F may be part of the same scale, but play adjacent ones together and it's dissonant), and/or in sticking in some or all of the 5 excluded notes as well, in which latter case it's chromatic dissonance, "chromatic" meaning that you're using all the "colors" available, and the chromatic scale is the one with all 12 notes in it.
Use enough chromatic dissonance in your music, and listeners will start to lose the sense of the tonic, the home note. Schoenberg's insight was to do this deliberately, employ all 12 tones completely impartially, and totally erase that sense of the tonic. (And that's why it's called "atonality", Arnold, you berk.)
Schoenberg employed all kinds of rules to prevent a sense of a tonic center from creeping into his music. His basic one was to begin by writing what he called a "tone row", an arrangement of all 12 pitches in some order. You shouldn't have more than 2 pitches in succession that are in the same major or minor scale, for instance, and you had to go through all 12 before repeating any. Of course, in practice it was more complicated than that, but the goal was to be entirely rigid.
What Webern is saying in the article you link to is that, even with that, it's impossible to eradicate entirely the human mind's sense of a tonal center. I'd say that what would be more accurate is that it's impossible to eradicate the mind's search for a tonal center. Which is why 12-tone music, and even more music that aspires to the condition of 12-tone without quite sticking to Schoenberg's rules, is so damned disconcerting to listen to, much more than music with any amount of chromatic dissonance.
Schoenberg's hope had been to train the ear to accept 12-tone as "normal", but in that hope his project was a disastrous, and predictable, failure, but one which caused as much damage in the artistic realm as the equally disastrous failure of Prohibition did in social policy and in real life.