# What is exactly the new thing that atonal music offers



## aleazk (Sep 30, 2011)

Inspired by fellow blogger @millionrainbows, I will proceed to copy some posts from the main board here that summarize my views.

The novel aspects that atonal music offers, I claim, have nothing to do with tension/relief dialectics realized in terms of harmonic dissonance. In the harmonic realm, it's about intervallic color and the diverse and free palette one has for this which is absent (in the free way in which it is present in atonal music) in tonal music due to its concerns with harmonic function, tension/relief, etc. Debussy already understood this when he started to use certain chords and scales as coloration devices rather than for harmonic function. This is why he's considered as the first modernist. And, also, harmonic tension/relief is not completely absent either (although, of course, to a different degree than tonal music, in the same way that tonal music also has intervallic coloring, but to a different degree than atonal music.)

If you look for tension/relief dialectics in atonal music, you are imposing the rules of one system to another. But this imposition is a logical mistake, since we are talking about two completely different languages.

The so-called emancipation of the dissonance is actually more a side effect rather than a goal in itself. At least if we put it in the perspective of all the years that have passed since its introduction. In line with my coloring take, I would say that if one wants to achieve this type of subtle play of harmonic colorations, one needs to have freedom in how to handle the intervals. Tonal functionality tends to constraint this, and this is why one simply discards it.

Ravel understood this when he applauded Schoenberg, but without accepting his actual system, when he said:

"_In fact, the influence of Schoenberg may be overwhelming on his followers, but the significance of his art is to be identified with influences of a more subtle kind-not the system, but the aesthetic, of his art. I am quite conscious of the fact that my Chansons madécasses are in no way Schoenbergian, but I do not know whether I ever should have been able to write them had Schoenberg never written_."

Since harmonic function is not relevant in the atonal language, I have simply learned to ignore it in order to concentrate in the relevant stuff. As a result, unresolved dissonance, in the traditional sense, doesn't produce any distress on me when I listen to atonal music.


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