Atonality

[randy_byers]

So I think I've always thought of "atonality" and "dissonance" as vaguely the same thing. Reading Alex Ross' The Rest Is Noise I came to the conclusion that this was wrong, and that atonality referred to a lack of a tonal center -- the tonal center of a piece traditionally announced by saying that it's in C Major or G Minor or whatever. Wikipedia elaborates: "Atonality, in this sense, usually describes compositions written from about 1908 to the present day where a hierarchy of pitches focusing on a single, central tone is not used, and the notes of the chromatic scale function independently of one another. More narrowly, the term atonality describes music that does not conform to the system of tonal hierarchies that characterized classical European music between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries."

The more I dig into this, the less clear it becomes. For one thing, it turns out I don't really understand the theory and practice of tonality, let alone concepts such as the chromatic scale. Pretty soon I'm deep into music theory, which means I'm quickly in over my head. Even in my confusion, however, I can't help but be entertained by the fact that the term "atonal" is itself controversial, with Schoenberg quoted as arguing, "The word 'atonal' could only signify something entirely inconsistent with the nature of tone... to call any relation of tones atonal is just as farfetched as it would be to designate a relation of colors aspectral or acomplementary. There is no such antithesis."

It also seems that there actually is some kind of connection between atonality and dissonance, with Schoenberg also arguing that "By the later nineteenth century the higher numbered dominant-quality dissonances had also achieved harmonic status, with resolution delayed or omitted completely. The greater autonomy of the dominant-quality dissonance contributed significantly to the weakening of traditional tonal function within a purely diatonic context." If I understand this at all (big if!), he seems to be saying that greater acceptance of dissonance in composition was part of the process by which tonality became less important over time.

I think it might help me to have these concepts illustrated with musical examples. The Wikipedia article on atonality mentions that Debussy composed some atonal music, but it doesn't say which pieces qualify. I've been digging around into articles about the tonic, dominant, triads, diatonic scale, etc and just feeling that I haven't a clue what it all sounds like. I took two years of piano when I was in elementary school, and sometimes I wish I'd stuck with it longer just so I'd understand scales and chords better. Well, I guess I sang in choirs up through high school too, but it didn't help. (Now there's some personal history I don't think about much anymore! Yes, I was a high school tenor.)

Update: "Tonality, Modality, and Atonality" sheds more light on this for me: "Objectively, there can be no atonality, as Schoenberg himself maintained. Composers of atonal music try to avoid all reminders of tonal music, evading major and minor chords (tertian chords in general), scales, keys, dominant functions, regular rhythms, repetition, etc. This means that atonality is psychoacoustical; i.e., it depends, at least partly, upon individual sensibilities and subjectivity."

Comments

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

My point isn't that Wikipedia is wrong - in these types of articles it's fairly reliable - but that it's incomprehensible to non-experts. It's not the place for non-experts to educate themselves on technical subjects.

I can't easily find from Ross's index where he says that Debussy wrote atonal music, though he does mention Liszt. And he quotes Debussy as calling Schoenberg "organized ugliness," which shows how far from the spirit of serialism Debussy was. I expect that associating Debussy with atonality is technically and narrowly correct but entirely misleading.

In 20C music, finding or not finding a key named in the title is almost unrelated to whether the work is tonal, either way. For one thing, it's untraditional to list a key for works with individual names (as opposed to a genre name), regardless of how traditionally tonal it may be, and such titles became more common in the 20C. And the tradition lasted for genre works beyond its usefulness. Labeling his String Quartet as in G Minor was more a bow to respectability than a useful statement on Debussy's part.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Speaking of resources, I've just discovered that I have access to Grove Music Online (a subsidiary of Oxford Music Online) via the University. Oh dear.

Sez here: "Atonality. A term that may be used in three senses: first, to describe all music which is not tonal; second, to describe all music which is neither tonal nor serial; and third, to describe specifically the post-tonal and pre-12-note music of Berg, Webern and Schoenberg. (While serial music is, by the first definition, atonal, it differs in essential respects from other atonal music and is discussed in the articles Serialism and Twelve-note composition; it is, therefore, not considered here.)"

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

OK, I can see how it's confusing. Grove is being a lot more stringent in terminology than I've been. I picked up your use of "atonality" and didn't switch to "serialism" soon enough, because much of the time that's what I really meant. Twelve-tone music is serial, though "serialism" usually refers to taking 12-Tone As A Way Of Life more worshipfully than even Schoenberg did, often applying it to other aspects of music than tones, a philosophy also called "total serialism."

Grove's third definition is a subset of the second, which is a subset of the first. Did that come across to you?

When I wrote of "music that aspires to the condition of 12-tone without quite sticking to Schoenberg's rules," I meant music that's atonal by Grove's second definition, i.e. stuff that follows Schoenberg's general idea but doesn't take his precautions to avoid establishing an accidental sense of a tonic. It's written with no intended tonic but doesn't use tone rows. If there's any atonal music by Debussy, that's the box it would go in.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

It will take a while for this stuff to make sense to me (if it ever does), and as I said in my post, part of the process will be understanding tonality better, since atonality seems to exist only in relation to tonality (cf. Grove's first definition).

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Regarding Debussy and key signatures, Grove says: "In as much as notation reflects compositional thinking, it is interesting to observe the expanded denoting of key signatures in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as a kind of musical barometer. The point of a key signature in the music of Debussy, for example, is often only to delimit a pitch-class collection – usually the whole or part of a diatonic scale – rather than to prescribe a diatonic scale with the implied functional associations of tonic and dominant triads, consonance and dissonance, and so on, as in the notation and music of Liszt. On the other hand, the key signature of four sharps in Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony op.9 serves more to indicate that an E major triad will function in some hierarchically significant way than to delimit a scale. The first pages of the composition are, in fact, so full of symmetrical collections, such as the whole-tone scale and the augmented triad, that the key signature serves virtually no practical purpose."

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

When an 18th century work is said to be in a particular key, that really means something. The entire work is built around that key. Not necessarily all of it will be in that key, but the other keys used will be in a recognizable traditional relationship with it. The music will move temporarily into the subdominant or the relative minor or whatever, and the nature of that key's relationship with the original tonic will be palpable.

As the 19th century wore on, composers began moving beyond these traditional shifts. In Mahler, for instance, the key that a work is named as being in is the first strongly established key (not necessarily the first key to be heard), and it then may move off to, and indeed be largely focused on achieving, some other key or keys altogether. Debussy named a central note and a principal mode, but the work isn't actually "in" G Minor in any sense that the 18th century would recognize.