# Critical New Research on Atonal Music



## mmsbls (Mar 6, 2011)

New paper from a group of music theorists focuses on atonal music. They conclude that "analysts of ... atonal music have been systematically misled for more than a century."


----------



## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

mmsbls said:


> New paper from a group of music theorists focuses on atonal music. They conclude that "analysts of ... atonal music have been systematically misled for more than a century."


Ah yes, Huilun pointed me to this too...


----------



## Manxfeeder (Oct 19, 2010)

Whew! Now that's all cleared up, people can start listening to it like they listen to Brahms.


----------



## Guest (Nov 12, 2015)

Now I know it's in A Minor I don't enjoy it.


----------



## ComposerOfAvantGarde (Dec 2, 2011)

my favourite sentence:



a dumbass who beleives major=happy said:


> "100 per cent of published Circle of Fifths diagrams give no sharps and flats as the key signature of both C major and A minor," said Huron. "And since none of this music sounds very happy, we were able to rule out C major as the key signature


----------



## Bulldog (Nov 21, 2013)

I'm not knowledgeable about musical structure, but I have the feeling that the A minor solution doesn't tell us much.


----------



## SeptimalTritone (Jul 7, 2014)

You know, when the first two notes of Schoenberg's piano piece op 11 were B and G# on the score, I actually believed the article for a sec. I thought it was saying that just op 11 was in A minor, until I realized it was a joke when it said that everything was in A minor.

Didn't Mahlerian say that op 25 was in G minor?

(Serious here).


----------



## arpeggio (Oct 4, 2012)

The article is not very good. I have not seen the actual study so it is probably much better.

For one thing the article makes a bogus observations about key signatures. Well I just performed a few weeks ago Robert Russell Bennett's _Suite of Old American Dances_. It has no key signature yet I doubt that anyone can say it is in a minor.

I have played a lot of tonal music that has no key signature.

I played Hindemith's _Symphony in Bb_. It has no key signature. According the author of the article is he saying it is really in 'a' minor?

Even if this paper is correct, so what? One can probably make the argument that all of these works were in 'c' minor.

I can see that a person can make an argument that these works were actually in some minor key but to state that they are in 'a' minor simple because there are no key signatures is bogus.

Even if they have been lying to me all of these years I am still going to listen to Schoenberg and Carter.

I wonder if the author of the article is misrepresenting the findings of the actual study.


----------



## TurnaboutVox (Sep 22, 2013)

> GENEVA-Physicists affiliated with the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) released a report Wednesday revealing that classical music exists in a field of reality entirely removed from the four-dimensional spacetime inhabited by human beings.
> 
> Scientists were performing a routine search for fifth-dimensional activity using the Large Hadron Collider, the immense particle accelerator famous for proving the existence of the Higgs Boson, when they came across the entire corpus of Western classical music from 9th-century plainchant to Nico Muhly.
> 
> ...


Submediant, October 1st, 2015


----------



## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

SeptimalTritone said:


> Didn't Mahlerian say that op 25 was in G minor?
> 
> (Serious here).


No. I said that the prelude had a center around the note G, not that it was in the key of G minor. Obviously, it's not in a key, per se.


----------



## Guest (Nov 13, 2015)

Manxfeeder said:


> Whew! Now that's all cleared up, people can start listening to it like they listen to Brahms.


But I don't like listening to Brahms....!?


----------



## arpeggio (Oct 4, 2012)

I am beginning to think I have been conned again. 

I think that maybe the article in the Submediant is a joke.

I accessed the website for the SOCIETY FOR MUSIC THEORY and located the program for the conference that was cited in the Submediant article. I could not find any reference to the atonal music is in a minor study: https://societymusictheory.org/files/meeting2015/final_program.pdf

For example one of the authors of the study was a Carol Krumhansl, professor of music psychology at Cornell University. Yet when I did a search of the program there was no mention of the report she co-authored.


----------



## ComposerOfAvantGarde (Dec 2, 2011)

arpeggio said:


> I am beginning to think I have been conned again.
> 
> I think that maybe the article in the Submediant is a joke.
> 
> ...


Gotcha!


----------



## Huilunsoittaja (Apr 6, 2010)

“When you leave a museum, you know the paintings are still there. But where does Beethoven’s Fifth go when you’re not around? Now we know.”

lol I love that quote


----------



## ComposerOfAvantGarde (Dec 2, 2011)

Do they mean Beethoven's diminished fifth or augmented fifth?


----------



## ComposerOfAvantGarde (Dec 2, 2011)

Or perfect fifth.....


----------

