"So-called ‘Atonal’ Music Has Just Been In A Minor All Along" - Discuss....

[Lat-Literal]

Well, there's always the scientific factor of the harmonic series, which is not only naturally occurring but also found in something that I think most of us here could accept as tonal input.

"Atonality" - insofar as it might be believed to exist in its own right (whatever that might or miught now be) - hasn't replaced "tonality" (and nor should it or need it) because it offers the possibility of expanding the overall expressive capacity of musical language; who in his/her right mind would not want that to happen?

Not me.

That is very clear from my forum profile.

I'm grateful by the way that the thing I concocted in a wholly half-baked half-hour wasn't a total turn-off. I'm not sure that's entirely deserved. I just feel that there is now a question about progression. Atonality in 2015 is about finding the corners of the city that haven't been visited before and/or exploring known quarters in ever and ever greater depth. It is still a part of the city, a city in which tradition is very evident at its heart. There are wonderful ongoing possibilities with the atonally new. With enough imagination, there is no place - certainly no city - in which anyone should be bored. But when those "musical art galleries" began to emerge, not without controversy, it was without question a gigantic leap and we haven't seen a similar leap since. There are considerations here about World Music and indeed classical compositions which look outwards. Holst's "The Planets" perhaps. That is "shurely" expansion - significant in its own right - but also it is in a vacuum of true musical progression. The same is true of delving into musical history.

Currently, there's lots of back and forth!

I do recognise there is a technical musical perspective on the original points. I don't have the ability to comment there - but I doubt that should be separated from everything else.

[kea]

Probably the, er, key-note clue in that article is where the author refers to the Rite of Spring and Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra as part of his argument.

Amusingly, the Rite of Spring actually is in A minor (allowing for a very broad definition of "A minor"—i.e. the work's modal centre is A at the beginning and end of the piece, and the third scale degree is lowered in both cases), and musicologists have in total seriousness argued that A minor is the key of Liszt's Bagatelle sans tonalité, also cited in the article. The Concerto for Orchestra, however, is in F major.

[Sydney Grew]

"Atonality" - insofar as it might be believed to exist in its own right (whatever that might or miught now be) - hasn't replaced "tonality" (and nor should it or need it) because it offers the possibility of expanding the overall expressive capacity of musical language . . .

That in its way is all very well, but we must take the utmost care must we not not to fail to distinguish the products of the pantonalists from those of the wrong note school. The two were are and will be opposites, almost. Shtrafinsci was at bottom always one of the latter poor old light-weight chap.

[Bryn]

... Shtrafinsci[sic] was at bottom always one of the latter poor old light-weight chap.

This is all very confusing. Is SGrew claiming that all practitioners of teh "wrong note school" are in fact some sort of Borg-like multi-part clone, or is it just horribly poor grammar on SGrew's part?

[ahinton]

That in its way is all very well, but we must take the utmost care must we not

Who must do this?

not to fail to distinguish the products of the pantonalists from those of the wrong note school. The two were are and will be opposites, almost.

Wrong note "school"? Hmmm...

Shtrafinsci was at bottom always one of the latter poor old light-weight chap.

Never heard of him/her. I have heard of Stravinsky, however and I must admit that not much of his post WWI-work does much for me, but that's surely not the point; this so-called "school "needs a good deal of definition before your point can be discussed.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Either that or all this "so-called" "atonal" music is actually in Z minor...

4-Z15 or 4-Z29, for example?

[Beef Oven!]

Can't quite see the relationship between these and either karmic wheels or circles of fifths, actually...

Ask Bob.

[ahinton]

Ask Bob.

Bob who?

[P. G. Tipps]

Bob who?

Bob Simpson, but sadly he's now incommunicado ...

[ahinton]

Bob Simpson, but sadly he's now incommunicado ...

Given the thread context, he might have been my first thought as to whom Beefy meant were it not for his having departed almos 20 years ao, so I remain in the dark on this.

[Lat-Literal]

Given the thread context, he might have been my first thought as to whom Beefy meant were it not for his having departed almost 20 years ago, so I remain in the dark on this.

I assumed it was a reference to Bob Holness in "Blockbusters".

[Lat-Literal]

Well, there's always the scientific factor of the harmonic series, which is not only naturally occurring but also found in something that I think most of us here could accept as tonal input.

"Atonality" - insofar as it might be believed to exist in its own right (whatever that might or might not be) - hasn't replaced "tonality" (and nor should it or need it) because it offers the possibility of expanding the overall expressive capacity of musical language; who in his/her right mind would not want that to happen?

On reflection, to take on karma and science and the technical side of music composition was too big and I have no desire to prolong it. I already question what I said and this is a brief attempt to address that feeling. It may make more sense. I hope so. Clearly, there is a distinction between free atonal music and twelve tone and serialism which are distinctly formulaic and worthy of a comparison with approaches by J S Bach. Bach didn't exactly wipe out all earlier music but there is little doubt that nothing was quite the same afterwards. Then I think one might look at the formualic approach of Xenakis vis a vis Parminedes. I wouldn't suggest that any of it was intended to "replace" but there is an inference even if it driven through, say, the prism of Nazi paranoia. Of course, the political clout of the latter gave "alternatives" more validity and force in representational terms.

In free-form, the atonal was kaleidoscopic and perhaps adolescent in the best sense in that it was groundbreaking and in line with the principle that progress cannot be halted. But as soon as someone sits there with mathematical formulae and goddamit a clear theory, it becomes very grown up and it is not necessarily going to sit prettily alongside whatever went before it. One can be both reasonably advanced and kaleidoscopic - I do it myself in terms of breadth of musical appreciation - and I would not suggest for one moment that science is more advanced than art. But I think if there is a conscious decision a la Schoenberg to introduce arithmetic to the palette, then some sort of scientific assessment is virtually requested. I do recognise that he didn't like the term "atonal" himself. What I feel is that it introduced a perspective that essentially leads to never-ending possibilities. But until another groundbreaking language for music is found, if ever, it is in character a myriad yet developmentally stasis. The same is largely true today of music in the round.

As a footnote, I think any theory in this area can be explained by the person who puts it forward. We probably agreed that the link in the OP was satirical and many approached it on that basis. If it wasn't, I would see the author as essentially conservative in leaning. He would be saying somewhat dismissively that whatever occurred in the 20th Century was just how things had always been. Today, some of it - atonal music, the experimental - will proclaim to sit rigidly on the outside and some of it will accept it is drawn into the tonal centre or engaged in moderate interplay. But for as long as there is a tonal centre it hardly matters what the stances might be because there remains a tonal centre. You cannot "un-invent" it but theoretically it could be made as redundant culturally as if it had been but that hasn't occurred. A new theory or a new language would alter those dynamics.

Thanks!!!

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

The problem I have with associating vocabulary like "formulaic", "mathematical" and "theory" with Atonality and/or Serialism, is that it sort of suggests that other types of Music are not equally "formulaic", "mathematical" and "theoretical". Diatonic "tonal" Music (from, say, Monteverdi to Verdi) for example - with its upper and lower tetrachords, periodic phrasing, tempered scales, voice-leading algorithms, enharmonic equivalences (to say nothing of its attitudes to parallel fifths): there is more "mathematics" involved in a Gilbert & Sullivan patter song that in Erwartung - to say nothing of The Twelve Days of Christmas!

What is often meant/presumed is that somehow or other (and I have never worked out how this was supposed to have happened) with Atonal/Serial Music, the Theory was "invented" first, and then the notes were written on paper following the "rules" of the Theory. The careers of the "Atonal" composers (Debussy, Scriabin, Ives, Stravinsky, Schönberg, Berg, Webern etc) quickly demonstrates that this is a false idea - that (some) Music moved from a variety of different sources (chiefly Mussorgsky and/or Brahms) into the expanded chromaticism of those composers and, in the case of the last three composers on that list (and Hauer) gradually into Dodecaphonic and (with later composers) other types of Serialism.

Atonality uses all the Harmonic/Thematic apparatus of mid-late 19th Century Tonal Music - Schönberg himself referred to his Music that is nowadays called "free Atonal" as "composing with the notes of a motif" and his Twelve-Note Music as "related only to each other": in both cases referring to how he uses harmony: the intervals connecting the notes. When Stravinsky finally "twigged" Serialism, he exclaimed that there was no difference with his former composing practices ("I've always composed with intervals"). Serialism was a means for generating the sort of large-scale structural patterns that had evolved for Tonal Musics for the new ways that harmony was used in "free Atonal" Music. From there, new patterns started to be heard - new relationships that had their origins entirely in Musical and Acoustic phenomena, and that really disturbed Schoenberg and his entire aesthetic as he became increasingly aware of them (the "recapitulation" of the First movement of the Fourth String Quartet is a seismic moment in the composer's career - it really marks a turning point in the composer's alliance to the Austro-German ancestors he revered) and moved the possibilities of Serialism onto the shoulders of the next generation.


All of which is more vital, more exciting, more Musical than trying to hear Tonality in a piece whose motivation (ho-ho) lies in much more interesting directions.

But why is it only Music that attracts the sort of crap that is represented by the article (spoof or otherwise)? Is there any equivalent in the visual Arts, for example - are there similar infantile offerings trying to see the bowl of fruit still life in a Mondrian painting?

[verismissimo]

... But why is it only Music that attracts the sort of crap that is represented by the article (spoof or otherwise)? Is there any equivalent in the visual Arts, for example - are there similar infantile offerings trying to see the bowl of fruit still life in a Mondrian painting?

I've always thought that cubism attracts the same sort of cart before horse exegesis, ferney.

[verismissimo]

I've always thought that cubism attracts the same sort of cart before horse exegesis, ferney.

And, speaking of horses, I think that the poet Roy Campbell nailed it all very neatly

They use the snaffle and the curb all right,
But where's the bloody horse?