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

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

I doesn't sound like that to me and never has done - it has a magical way of inferring such an idea but doesn't actually state it, to my ears and mind

No - nor to me, and it took some effort on my part to hear it as a V7 of G when I read that RVW had originally heard/conceived it in this way (an effort that succeeded only when I reimagined the Music "resolving" onto G major, which is like adding Cola to Lagavullin - something neither to be relished nor repeated!) It is the context of how the Music continues that makes hearing the opening sonority as a D7 unlikely: just as (to me) the D-G-B-E doesn't sound like an added sixth chord in the context of the Webern Cantata - nor does the opening bars of Beethoven's Fifth sound like it could be in Eb major, though I do wonder if the composer and his contemporaries might have felt such an ambiguity.

Well, that's not quite how I'd put it; I would say that it's a closely related key in the first example and a distantly related on in the latter.

You are absolutely right, of course - for my suggested example to "work" itself depends on context. In the context of a piece written in the style of a composer writing in 1790, with the harmonic conventions of that time, a "consonant" D major triad appearing in a piece in Ab major (and I realize that there aren't that many!) would appear more "dissonant" and would require the Music to "justify" such an appearance - otherwise it would just sound as if the performer had made a rather eccentric mistake. In the context of harmonic conventions from a century later, the sense of a "dissonant" "lurch" might not be so marked.

Yes, the music itself - be it Bach's, Webern's, Liszt's, Schönberg's, Messiaen's or whoever else's - is what "tells" the ear how to perceive, or rather offers perceptions as to how it can (not should!) be heard, even though not all pairs of ears will be attached to brains with identical previous listening experiences.

Precisely so - and, as you have correctly pointed out elsewhere, even following the suggestions that the Music offers, different individuals "hear"/"perceive" very different things.