#atonalism

[victorieschild]

Please please PLEASE write a massive rant about atonalism

alright you asked for this and yes i did write this just now

Atonalism is one of the many defining genres of the early 20th century. You could define it in various ways, especially considering all the sub-genres within ‘atonalism’, but it can be generally described as music written with no tonal centre. This means that it has no defining key, unlike any other song you might hear on the radio, and therefore is generally very unpleasant to listen to.

Atonalism was an extremely innovative genre in it’s hay-day, however, it received inordinate amounts of criticism for it’s dismissal of popular styles and it’s seeming disregard for creating pleasant, or “good”, music. But to understand why this was the case we need to understand the cultural, political and musical context of the time.

The turn of the 19th century was a very poignant time for both the world around us and the world of music. As the 20th century came into view, music saw a clash between styles of the past, namely romanticism, and future, which delved into more ambiguous chords and interesting ways at looking at tone and harmony, causing what some call a “crisis of tonality”. At the beginning of the 1900s, the romantic era fell to styles like impressionism, expressionism, atonalism and others which sought to rebel against old ideals of music. Atonality was lead most famously by Arnold Schoenberg, who wrote some of the most famous pieces of atonal music. 

As time went on, the world was faced with the horrors of both the first and second world war, which greatly affected the atonal music of the time. Atonalism, though it is a very structured genre of music, sounds very messy, chaotic and sometimes confronting to audiences which made it an amazing conduit for expressing the pain that came with such horrible events like the holocaust. Because of these qualities, it was also later utilised after further disasters during the century, though it is almost exclusively known for it’s run during the early 1900s (particularly because of Schoenberg). My personal favourite example of this is Threnody For The Victims of Hiroshima (released in 1992 i think)

Atonalism, as previously stated, is a genre – when only listened to – that exudes a strong sense of chaos and stress, however it is an extremely structured genre of music. One of the best examples of this is ‘Serialism’. Serialism is a form of atonalism which utilises serialist matrixes (big ol’ grids) to create the harmonic sequence of a piece. (Here’s one now!)

(example found on google)

This is an extremely mathematical form of music and requires extreme dedication to learn and play. 

Thanks to the lack of tonal centre, atonalist music is very difficult to predict and learn, and even harder to play in ensemble or orchestra. Many forms of atonalism also utilise extremes in expression/expressive devices and uncommon/rarely used techniques like col legno (violin). Which makes it a massive pain in the ass to play.

Atonalism was truly a mile stone in not only modern/20th century music, but also in the innovation of music as an art form. It is a wholly unique form of artistic creation and still remains an important and interesting genre years later. 

even though i like impressionism more #BringBackDebussy2k20

List of the songs mentioned:

Pierrot lunaire

Peripetie

A Survivor from Warsaw

Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima

[redshift-13]

The Atonal Genie | Philip Clark

Arnold Schoenberg's music still challenges listeners, but his twelve-tone technique also turns up in all sorts of unexpected places, from ho

My first impression of Schoenberg was how modern his music sounded. After listening for a while it began to cast a defining light over everyday subjectivity, the visual landscape and historical events fraught with darkness and disturbed wonder about who we really are. Human thought and experience had turned a corner at some point and found its natural expression in Schoenbergian atonalism. Schoenberg as musical psychologist of the 20th century.

Arnold Schoenberg, The Red Gaze - 1910

Too often Schoenberg has been written up as the composer who swept the decks clean after Wagnerian and Mahlerian excesses inevitably toppled over and who enforced order upon Romantic harmonic wanderlust. But Schoenberg has consistently proved as much a beginning, a figure who inspired musicians to dig ever deeper into sound, as any sort of historical endpoint. Cage, who managed to isolate something specific out of Schoenberg’s method and then moved it in a direction his onetime teacher could never have dreamed—or indeed approved—of, exemplifies how the influence proliferated. The late-period work of Cage’s friend and composer colleague Morton Feldman demonstrated how objectifying systemization could be applied to material tonal in its inference, creating a music of delicate, poised beauty. His piano work For Bunita Marcus (1985) sounds like tonality with all the usual anchors and landmarks rubbed out. The retort that Schoenberg mattered only to a narrow band of High Modernist fellow travelers—Carter, Pierre Boulez, Luigi Nono, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Milton Babbitt—whose music never captured the imagination or the affection of the music-loving public is never far away, but classical commentators, too often lacking the analytical tools to listen outside their own area, have repeatedly ducked the task of explaining why this is not the case. The atonal genie Schoenberg freed from the bottle turns up in the most unlikely places. Anton Webern—arguably Schoenberg’s most famous pupil—became a poster boy for avant-garde composition. But in mid-1960s Sheffield, England, the guitarist Derek Bailey got bitten by the atonal bug after stumbling across a Webern LP. Bailey, then a jazz guitarist obsessed with Charlie Christian and Wes Montgomery, heard Webern’s music dicing up sound in ways he hadn’t experienced before, which handed him new structures for improvisation. Jazz was out; free improvisation was in.

If Bailey, who became a guru of British free improvisation, feels too much of a musician’s musician around which to hang any claims about Schoenberg creeping beyond the confines of modern composition, how about Frank Zappa? Webern, Zappa said, “filled me with awe—I couldn’t believe anyone would write music like that,” and he revered Schoenberg equally. Sprechstimme helped Zappa to develop his approach to delivering a vocal. “A Nun Suit Painted on Some Old Boxes,” from his screwball film 200 Motels (1971), always sounds to me like an overt hat tip to his favorite Schoenberg work, Pierrot lunaire. Or how about Lou Reed, whose teenage interest in Lulu, the atonal opera by Schoenberg’s pupil Alban Berg, is another example of atonal music helping form a musical imagination? Lulu’s stark expressionism stuck with Reed, handing him the subject (and title) of a late album recorded with the metal group Metallica. Brian Eno, whose boundless sonic imagination helped shape albums by David Bowie, Devo, and Laurie Anderson, as a young man found himself enthralled by postwar modernism and concepts derived from Cage. Schoenberg’s solidly compacted scores, in which every note must count, might feel antithetical to ambient composition, the music for which Eno is most famous. Ambient pieces, usually electronic, exist not to be performed but as a means of using sound to accentuate the dimensions of a space. Eno’s harmonies, caressing the corners of a room, flowing around the architecture, have no need for representational musical narrative. His no-gravity music liberates notes from their usual tonal function through objectivizing algorithms, an idea that has always felt to me like a distant cousin of Schoenbergian tone rows zapping harmonic hierarchies.

One of my favorite Schoenberg pieces:

[literally-1894]

Schoenboogie

[senfonikankara]

Müziği Düşünmek | Adorno, Weber & Bourdieu

[atireapparel]

“ATONALISM” Keys & Leaves Hoodie

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[fatal-conceit]

Arnold Schoenberg, Pierrot Lunaire