# What is the point of Tonal music?



## ComposerOfAvantGarde (Dec 2, 2011)

(Okay, I'm pretty sure alot of people are scoffing at the title of this thread.  )

Since almost the very beginning of my introduction to classical music (A few years ago, though it practically consumes my life now), I have been aware of tonal composers and heaps of their works. Studying composition myself, I have always been told by teachers and professors that tonal music or near tonal music (sorry I don't have a better term for this genre) is all that I should study to develop my contrapuntal technique.

I have made an effort on a few occasions to really listen to tonal music and witness the superior range of expression conservative listeners claim it has. In general, I find most of what I listened to is just kind of terrifying and sometimes annoying. For instance, in Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik I was either finding humour in how stupidly predictable some moments were, or being terrified by the sounds I was hearing. There is such a focus on this genre of music with musicians and composers now that I just don't understand.

Classical music was finally realised with atonality. Years ago, composers were writing this.

I understand that composers are always supposed to study the old stuff and learn about voice leading and harmony, but if that Beethoven piece represents what most of the population recognise at classical music, why should I want to listen to it? It's true that good music should be enjoyed by it's audience, but how simple should it be to have leave a good impression on the listener? In all of the different phases and evolutions of classical music, ours is certainly the age of innovation and atonality, where we can put behind the great importance of melody and harmony and focus more on the beauty of tone colour, rhythm, orchestration etc.

I could write more, but I don't want to drag this out into a huge essay. I guess my questions to those that enjoy (and perhaps also compose!) tonal muisc would be: Have you ever heard a tonal work from before 1900 that pushed the limits to expression through tone colour and cluster chords, complex polyrhythms or other elements typical to atonal music? Do you feel strongly enough about tonal music to suggest that a *Ligeti* enthusiast should never listen to atonal music again? What is the point of writing with tonality now?


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## neoshredder (Nov 7, 2011)

Is this opposite day? Black is white and white is black? Tonal music is easier to express emotions. It is more memorable. It's what the majority of the population prefers. I'm sure there are plenty more reasons. I just don't feel like making an essay on it.


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## HarpsichordConcerto (Jan 1, 2010)

To have a nice romantic evening when you invite your girlfriend / boyfirend home. I mean, having when you play loud Xenakis in the background, it just doesn't work ...


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## KRoad (Jun 1, 2012)

Isn't this question essentially a "mirror" image of the "What is the point of atonality" thread? The issues are covered well there. As with the Wagner/Brahms debate, this debate too will be subsumed as our concept of classical music broadens with evolving aesthetics.


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## ComposerOfAvantGarde (Dec 2, 2011)

KRoad said:


> Isn't this question essentially a "mirror" image of the "What is the point of atonality" thread? The issues are covered well there. As with the Wagner/Brahms debate, this debate too will be subsumed as our concept of classical music broadens with evolving aesthetics.


Well I started this thread to parody the other one. If you go to the first page of "What is the point of atonality?" you will notice that I have basically copied and pasted it but changed a few words to give a mirror image.


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## Guest (Jul 10, 2012)

ComposerOfAvantGarde said:


> Have you ever heard a tonal work from before 1900 that pushed the limits to expression through tone colour and cluster chords, complex polyrhythms or other elements typical to atonal music? Do you feel strongly enough about tonal music to suggest that a *Ligeti* enthusiast should never listen to atonal music again? What is the point of writing with tonality now?


Yes, but those works might not seem quite so limit pushing now. Limits are things in constant motion. It is impossible for us to hear Beethoven now like Beethoven's contemporaries did. Too much time has passed. Too many things have happened, limit pushing things.

It's curious that even small children in 2012 cannot hear Beethoven like small children in 1812 could have. It's an interesting conundrum, but there it is.

I have found that the only 19th century composer who can pretty consistently keep me happy and interested, listen after listen, is Hector Berlioz. The others I can enjoy from time to time, often very much indeed. But not as consistently. I go through times when I just don't listen to Beethoven at all. Or Bruckner. Or Dvorak. But Berlioz? I can listen to him any old time for any length of time with no "tonality fatigue."

Otherwise, I don't find the tonality/atonality distinction to be terribly useful (or even important). Not nearly as interesting as the determinacy/indeterminacy distinction or the composed/improvised distinction or even the acousmatic/soundscape distinction. And I like music from both sides of all those great divides.

Anyway, to answer your last question, no point at all far as I can hear. Not any more. And even with pre-Schoenberg music, the whole "tonality" thing is the least interesting part of the situation, for me. The sounds are the thing, with old music as well as new. Admittedly, the narrative aspect of tonal music, that constant see-sawing between consonance and dissonance that for some strange reason creates the illusion of forward motion, does get on my nerves from time to time. But as that's never the ONLY thing going on in 17th/18th/19th century musics, it's never enough to make me reject any well-crafted piece. I can't imagine ever getting enough of the _St. Matthew Passion,_ for example.

And it's funny, too, that the pantonal/serial musics that get such a savaging from so many listeners, still, are the ones that most obviously sound like 17th/18th/and especially 19th century musics--everything is largely the same except for the business of keys. There's probably two simple reasons for that. One, the musics that don't reference tonality at all of any kind nor of anything that's the opposite of tonality are not musics that very many people know about. Two, and the things they do know about tend to just get lumped all together as "atonal" (horrible word).

There is no reason at all, good or bad, to ever stop listening to Ligeti. I'm pretty sure about that.


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## neoshredder (Nov 7, 2011)

ComposerOfAvantgarde has made my day no doubt. His weird taste in music and expressing of it adds a lot of flavour to this site.


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## KRoad (Jun 1, 2012)

ComposerOfAvantGarde said:


> Well I started this thread to parody the other one. If you go to the first page of "What is the point of atonality?" you will notice that I have basically copied and pasted it but changed a few words to give a mirror image.


Fair enough, then.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

So, what are we goin' to have next?

'What is the point of modal music?' thread.

'What is the point of microtonal music?' thread.

'What is the point of music using the pentatonic scale?' thread.

Fact is, that these types of questions are hokum. They are a red herring, basically. I just go with music that I enjoy. As a layman, I can scarcely tell why there is a division between some composers labelled as 'modern tonal' or 'atonal' or 'progressive tonal' or 'serial' most of the times. Bartok used microtones in at least one of his works - the solo violin sonata - as did Copland in his 'Vitebsk' piano trio. Schoenberg did not 'play' serialism 'by the rules' as much as Webern did. Harry Partch is microtonal and his 'layerings' are far more complex than anything Elliott Carter has done, yet I got into Partch much quicker (on the first listen!) than I did into Carter, whose music grew on me with time.

So there is no method to my madness. This whole thing is just a blind alley. IT'S ALL MUSIC, PEOPLE. That's as simple as I can put it. Cut the categorising crapola and just enjoy as much music as you can. & don't beat yourself if you don't 'get' or 'like' or 'understand' (or whatever) anything. Life is way too short for that.


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## macgeek2005 (Apr 1, 2006)

I would file this alongside others like these:

What is the point of carbon-based food?

What is the point of wheel-based cars?

What is the point of love-based relationships?

The idea of non-tonal music is unique to the western art tradition in the last one hundred years, out of all the traditions of all cultures ever in the history of humanity. It's a ridiculous idea, and it will never be popular. All well known, well loved music, from any tradition or culture, will always be tonal. Tonality IS music! Music is something that can resonate Harmonically and Melodically with people, something people can sing. Can you ever imagine in a piano bar at some point in the future, an old man sitting by the piano saying "Can you play that one classic song....?" and begin humming an atonal melody to the pianist?

Today the popular modern music of the western art tradition includes tonal film scores, jazz standards, broadway musicals, etc. All music. Stuff people can sing.


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## ComposerOfAvantGarde (Dec 2, 2011)

macgeek2005 said:


> I would file this alongside others like these:
> 
> What is the point of carbon-based food?
> 
> ...


Reminds me of that scene in _Wozzeck_ :lol:


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## Andreas (Apr 27, 2012)

Atonality is defined, semantically, by not being tonal. If tonal music disappeared, atonal music wouldn't have anything anymore against which it could define itself. If atonality is a breaking of the rules, then if the rules are gone, so is the possibility of breaking them.

Now, with dodecaphony, its different, since it doesn't need tonality to provide an enemy against which it can define itself.

Not sure if there is a need to write tonal music. But everyone's free to to as they wish. Same goes for the listener. Does tonal music advance the evolution of music? Probably not, it's rather reactionary in that sense.

Everything's already been said in tonal music? Perhaps. But as the saying goes: Everything has already been said, but not yet by everyone.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

HarpsichordConcerto said:


> To have a nice romantic evening when you invite your girlfriend / boyfirend home. I mean, having when you play loud Xenakis in the background, it just doesn't work ...


Nooo, you are WRONG!!!

I read THIS online review before I got this EMI set of Xenakis, incl. his work called _Akrata_. About that work, the guy doing the review said this:

_I have fond memories of having sex to Akrata on one occasion with another college student many years ago. _

So there you go. You can DO IT to Xenakis. It is possible. ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE :lol:...


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## ComposerOfAvantGarde (Dec 2, 2011)

Sid James said:


> Nooo, you are WRONG!!!
> 
> I read THIS online review before I got this EMI set of Xenakis, incl. his work called _Akrata_. About that work, the guy doing the review said this:
> 
> ...


You're starting to sound like *me*


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## macgeek2005 (Apr 1, 2006)

ComposerOfAvantGarde said:


> Reminds me of that scene in _Wozzeck_ :lol:


Hahahaha....


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

ComposerOfAvantGarde said:


> You're starting to sound like *me*


Well I think Mae and Gyorgy had much in common. Maybe when she said 'come up and see me sometime' to Cary Grant in that famous scene, Mae was thinking of putting on some chunky 'atonal' cuts as background music to her amorous pursuits. Who knows, anything is possible...


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## neoshredder (Nov 7, 2011)

Nothing like Atonal music to start the night off with your girl.


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## science (Oct 14, 2010)

If seductiveness is the standard measure, the greatest musician of all time must be someone like... Kenny G or something. If you think your significant other is too classy for Kenny G, then maybe Roy Orbison or Billie Holiday.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

science said:


> If seductiveness is the standard measure, the greatest musician of all time must be someone like... Kenny G or something. If you think your significant other is too classy for Kenny G, then maybe Roy Orbison or Billie Holiday.


& they are all 100 PER CENT TONAL. Kenny, Roy and Billie. ALL of their songs are in one key and one key only and there are no key changes and nothing 'fishy' like that going on. NO, IT IS TO EQUAL TEMPERAMENT TUNING LIKE "GOD." (you know who that is? But even 'he' experimented a lot...but let's not go there!).

There should be a '100 per cert certified tonal music' on the cover of cd's to make it 'safe' to listen to Bartok, who IS ONLY 'modern tonal' (forget he was 'atonal' in everything but name only in some things, forget that, the sticker is RIGHT).

I'm pushing this to farce but its just as ridiculous as this in reality sometimes. But I must admit, I am doing a stereotype of a minority of very unadventurous listeners, stuck maybe in 1812 (or before?)...


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## macgeek2005 (Apr 1, 2006)

Music Is Tonal!

Any and all non-tonal music will only ever be thought about, listened to or enjoyed by very select, highly academic fringe groups who happen to enjoy experiments in organized sound, but MUSIC it will never be!


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## ComposerOfAvantGarde (Dec 2, 2011)

macgeek2005 said:


> Music Is Tonal!
> 
> Any and all non-tonal music will only ever be thought about, listened to or enjoyed by very select, highly academic fringe groups who happen to enjoy experiments in organized sound, but MUSIC it will never be!


Music Is Organised Sound! It isn't just cute fluffy melodies to please your ears! You would be surprised at how many people enjoy listening to atonal music. People who don't think music can be atonal are weird and stuck with the 19th century music critic point of view.


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## mmsbls (Mar 6, 2011)

Very nicely constructed parody! Most people would have taken the general idea and some of the sentences modifying them to put the new twist on the whole argument. You followed the original thread very closely and reworded each idea with an appropriate and interesting change. I have one quibble with the parody and then a serious response.

My quibble - 
The original thread asked: Do you feel strongly enough about the music (atonal) to suggest that a friend should listen to it?
My answer: Yes.
You ask: Do you feel strongly enough about tonal music to suggest that a Ligeti enthusiast should never listen to atonal music again?
My answer: Of course not.
The more parallel question: Do you feel strongly enough about tonal music to suggest that a Ligeti enthusiast should listen to it?
My answer: Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! There's so much beauty to be found in tonal music, and (in my experience) overwhelmingly those who love atonal music have a great capacity to find beauty in tonal music. Go for it!

The more serious issue:
The original thread asks: It's true that good music should stimulate and challenge it's audience, but how challenging should it be to enjoy an artist's expression?
You ask: It's true that good music should be enjoyed by it's audience, but how simple should it be to have leave a good impression on the listener?

These questions are essentially the same but from opposite viewpoints. To me they are extremely fascinating and potentially very important. Most (many?) people do not like to be really challenged in anything so challenging music will leave them uninterested. Music is a wonderful human construct and I think most, if not all of us, feel that everyone should have music to enjoy. So for these people music must be relatively simple, and in fact the vast majority of today's music is what we at TC would probably call relatively simple. That's a good start (so everyone can enjoy some music).

Some want more complicated music, and certainly classical music is more complicated than popular music. The complexity of classical music has varied over time and seems to have increased significantly recently. In other threads I have asked, "Can music be too complex?" In other words, can the complexity of music in some genre increase to a point where so few people are interested that for all practical purposes there is no longer a music industry for that genre? As one dials down the complexity, more people get interested. Obviously we don't want only one level of complexity, but what levels are practical?

I don't know the answer to these questions (other than that there should be music for everyone to appreciate so keep a lot of it simple). You like more complex music, and composers are writing music that you enjoy. Luckily composers are writing music, both popular and classical, that many others enjoy as well.


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## Huilunsoittaja (Apr 6, 2010)

Tonality is for listeners who follow instinct.

Atonality is for listeners who reject instinct and replace it with _imposed _ideas. 
Imposed ideas like "This block chord _is _great, and _not _messy" or "resolving suspensions isn't important" or better yet, "This isn't dissonant, period." It's like hypnosis, you repeat something to yourself over and over, and eventually you'll start believing it. But now who told you those your ideas? Yourself? I bet it was someone else to begin with, and they got it from someone else, and it was all originated in consensus by a number of people, who wouldn't dare say it from an isolated, unsupported stand. Now, why they came up with these imposed ideas, that's a whole other complex and philosophical discussion.

Our brain works in certain ways, and it actually takes a bit of our natural instinct away to deny those fundamental aspects of music, discovered over the centuries.


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## Clementine (Nov 18, 2011)

I think the simple answer is that music is entirely subjective, and so composers are going to write music which speaks to them in an emotional and personal way. I view composition not so much as _creating_ music, but as _discovering_ it. Discovering what you like, and then writing it down in an organized fashion. I think the better question is, 'What is the point of limiting yourself to one idiom?' There's so much music to explore, so many sounds to discover, why only tinker away in one style?


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## starthrower (Dec 11, 2010)

Hey, when I'm making love I want the woman to make the music. I'll put on some Xenakis in the morning when it's time for her to leave.


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## Guest (Jul 10, 2012)

But Huilunsoittaja, surely you realize that what you're calling "instinct" is just some imposed ideas that have been around for awhile. (If "tonality" were truly instinctive, it would not have such a clear and well-documented history, nor would its history be so comparatively short.)

Indeed, this thread illustrates that it's just as silly to lump together a lot of quite disparate music under the heading of "tonal" as it is to lump together a lot of quite disparate music under the heading of "atonal." (It also illustrates, again, how slippery the definition of "tonal" is--how easy it is to lump together "tonal" and "consonant," too, as if dissonance were not the whole motivating force of tonality.)


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## clavichorder (May 2, 2011)

Duplicate.


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## clavichorder (May 2, 2011)

Tonal music came about when the modal composers got tired of being explorers and instead of actually discovering a natural island, built the big artificial barge of tonality that sank and became an island. It kept getting bigger and bigger until it conquered the sea with its sheer volume of chromaticism and furthermore ceased to be tonal as there was no longer any sea to contrast the man made land. Now the contrast loosely exists with land and space in the modern age of flight.


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## Head_case (Feb 5, 2010)

some guy said:


> But Huilunsoittaja, surely you realize that you're calling "instinct" is just some imposed ideas that have been around for awhile. (If "tonality" were truly instinctive, it would not have such a clear and well-documented history, nor would its history be so comparatively short.)


Not sure this logic is possible. Sexual drive is instinctive; yet there is a clear and well documented history of sexual drive, going beyond Freudian theory, more recently in the last century, covered by Michel Foucault's L'Histoire de la sexualité and Germaine Greer's feminist take on the same subject, after Simone de Beauvoir's La Deuxième Sexe.

The fact that the western history of sexuality is relatively short (compared to say, the Baghavad Gita in the east), is neither here nor there: instincts such as anxiety and fear, have only been analysed in western literature from around the time of Maine de Biran, or Soren Kierkegaard (early 19th century), however it does not follow, that anxiety or fear did not exist before these analyses were documented. Far from it, fear and anxiety have been postulated as being primitive and reflexive i.e. instinctual for man's survival.

Similarly, with tonality. The fact that we have only developed theoretical tools for mapping out distinctions, does not entail that these theoretical tools are always useful. If tonality is instinctive, then we would hear its prefiguration in the animal sounds; the bird cries and maybe babies in the womb would respond better to mothers who listen to Mozart than say Schoenberg?  
I don't know any such mother who might risk purposefully imposing such music on their unborn child *horror* although others inflict Take That; Madonna; Eminem on theirs, so anything's possible...

In warfare, the drum beat (no tone) has been used to organise the fighting instincts of men; advancements towards the horn or bugle (battle cry) in clear tonal expression on a battlefield, conveys much more than a drum (maybe that's due to tone? due to pitch? or the wave of notes which follow in succession, creating a semantic meaning, specific for soldiers on a field?)



> Indeed, this thread illustrates that it's just as silly to lump together a lot of quite disparate music under the heading of "tonal" as it is to lump together a lot of quite disparate music under the heading of "atonal." (It also illustrates, again, how slippery the definition of "tonal" is--how easy it is to lump together "tonal" and "consonant," too, as if dissonance were not the whole motivating force of tonality.)


That's true, but it was supposed to be a parody thread


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## Guest (Jul 10, 2012)

Head_case, I just answered another "completely distorts the original in order to make its point" response, so you'll forgive me, I'm sure, if I snap at you.

But really. Sexuality and fear are indeed instinctive. Nothing in my post suggests anything to the contrary. Huilunsoittaja was calling our responses to tonal music instinctive, which I found absurd because tonal music is neither universal nor has it been around all that long a while. Sexuality and fear have been around for forever. Tonality? A few hundred years. Neither tonal music nor our responses to it can be instinctive, though they might seem natural. But it doesn't take all that long for something to come to seem totally natural. 

It's not, as you surely already know, that tonal music goes back much farther than the histories of tonal music. It's that the history of tonal music reports that the thing itself is not that old.


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## HarpsichordConcerto (Jan 1, 2010)

In opera, I think tonal music tends to be more effective in expressing the characterisation of the plot and its characters then strictly 12-tone or related operas. But that is not at all to say 12-tone is incapable, which is not true. Many fine examples by Richard Strauss and Benjamin Britten for example to quote some familia names.


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## ComposerOfAvantGarde (Dec 2, 2011)

HarpsichordConcerto said:


> In opera, I think tonal music tends to be more effective in expressing the characterisation of the plot and its characters then strictly 12-tone or related operas. But that is not at all to say 12-tone is incapable, which is not true. Many fine examples by Richard Strauss and Benjamin Britten for example to quote some familia names.


That is an absurd thought. Even though this isn't dodecaphonic, I think the music in it is far more expressive than any opera by Strauss:


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## HarpsichordConcerto (Jan 1, 2010)

ComposerOfAvantGarde said:


> That is an absurd thought. Even though this isn't dodecaphonic, I think the music in it is far more expressive than any opera by Strauss:


Uh? Which part? I suggested both tonal and 12-tone do work in opera but I find tonal more effective. Richard Strauss and Britten examples were referring to 12-tone / related.


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## ComposerOfAvantGarde (Dec 2, 2011)

HarpsichordConcerto said:


> Uh? Which part? I suggested both tonal and 12-tone do work in opera but I find tonal more effective. Richard Strauss and Britten examples were referring to 12-tone / related.


You thinking tonal is more effective is absurd. It is *free atonality* that is the most effective for opera.


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## HarpsichordConcerto (Jan 1, 2010)

ComposerOfAvantGarde said:


> You thinking tonal is more effective is absurd. It is *free atonality* that is the most effective for opera.


Oh. Free atonality. That works too.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

It is wierd how guys like Wagner were virtually 'atonal,' esp. in his later operas, yet we don't 'blame' him for everything under the sun such as we do the atonalists, esp. Schoenberg. Its not the case on this forum this very minute, but it certainly has been the case in the past since I've been a member. One can even think of Schoenberg being a development of Wagner's experimentations, with guys like Mahler and Zemlinsky as in-betweens, not going 'all the way' like Schoenberg, Berg, Webern did.

I really don't know or don't care if opera is better done 'tonally,' 'atonally' or 'serially' or whatever. All I know is that Berg's _Wozzeck_ is rigorously constructed (eg. the 2nd act is cast in the form of a symphony), and he uses leitmotifs in that too, throughout the whole opera. How far was Berg from Wagner in terms of 'atonality'? I don't know, I'm not a musician. But the first time I heard _Wozzeck,_ some of the sounds made me immediately think of Wagner, but of course Berg is unique like all great composers are.

So again, I agree with what people said before. If a person who just wants to listen to music and open up to it doesn't care about these 'boxes,' then what's the use of all this labelling and ideology. I just go with what I like and often I don't know why. I don't care about the technique most of the time. It's often a 'gut' feeling and nothing more, at least at the start, but when I get to know the work more, my appreciation becomes deeper and I enjoy it even more.


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## Toddlertoddy (Sep 17, 2011)

I think we need to make a different user named ComposerOfConventional (or other word) and see wars break out.


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## StlukesguildOhio (Dec 25, 2006)

That is an absurd thought. Even though this isn't dodecaphonic, I think the music in it is far more expressive than any opera by Strauss:

WRONG!


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## ComposerOfAvantGarde (Dec 2, 2011)

^ ut: beleive what you like. I just state the truth, that's all.


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## pjang23 (Oct 8, 2009)

StlukesguildOhio said:


> That is an absurd thought. Even though this isn't dodecaphonic, I think the music in it is far more expressive than any opera by Strauss:
> 
> WRONG!


Well ain't that cute...


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## brianwalker (Dec 9, 2011)

*What's the point of tonal music? Here's why. *

This is the point of tonal music.

Starting in Paris during the fourteenth century, and coming to full realization during the fifteenth, Western musicians found means to create tonal expectations so compelling that the hearer's perception of the flow of musical time is guided by a sense of the musical future. Tonality-the system in which the horizontal unfolding of melody in time integrates with vertical consonance-has the unique capacity to generate a sense of the future.

Once musicians discovered how to link musical rhythm to the resolution of dissonance into consonance, Western music acquired a teleology. Every tonal work has a goal, the resolution of tonal tension in the return to the tonic by way of a final cadence from the dominant. The Austrian music theorist Heinrich Schenker identified a fundamental structure underlying each movement of a classical composition that guides a great passage away from and back to the tonic. All the elements of composition are there to fulfill this journey. Once the composer has created an expectation, it is possible to create tension by prolonging it, or create surprise and even humor by leading in an unexpected direction.* Deep expectations of the future act upon memory through the judgment of our mind's ear.* Thus, for instance, the Schenkerian theorist Carl Schachter introduced the distinction between durational and tonal, and identified higher-order rhythms in tonal music-work consistent with Augustine's teaching in the De Musica.

All Western theory had taught that music was founded upon consonance, the intervals that nature had provided in simple proportions that created a sense of stability for the ear. To sound two melodies together in counterpoint, the pitches intoned simultaneously must be at consonant intervals. But the musicians of Paris learned that not all notes had to be sung in consonant relation, only those that sounded at points of rhythmic stability. Dissonances were permitted so long as they occurred at points of rhythmic instability and led to a consonance.

The resolution of dissonance into consonance in the context of rhythm gave music a powerful means to create deep expectations. From the rhythmic alternation of dissonance and consonance in the note-by-note progression of late medieval counterpoint, fifteenth-century composers learned to prolong the tension and resolution of dissonance and consonance in longer musical forms. In late medieval counterpoint, a single dissonant note could be accommodated at a point of rhythmic instability; by the sixteenth century, tonality made possible whole regions of relative instability within a longer form.

The people of the past had no nostalgia; our nostalgia is an objective appraisal of the past. 


*Tinctoris remarked in 1470 that all the music worth listening to had been written in the preceding forty years-at the only moment in music history when a leading musician would have made that remark, and when it would have been true. *This uniquely Western art came into full flower in the last third of the fifteenth century in the Flemish school of Dufay, Ockeghem, and Josquin and was adopted by the Catholic Church in the middle of the sixteenth century during the generation of Palestrina and Victoria.

The fundamentals of rhythmic and tonal emphasis are perceptible to anyone who can hum a tune. Even the simplest rhythm creates expectations; we assume that the pattern we hear will continue, and that one verse will be like the next. We judge the time of individual syllables and feet within that rhythm according to our expectations. Just as Augustine argued, we do not grope our way blindly from beat to beat; on the contrary, we hear the individual beats with our mind's ear. Tonality allows the composer to create yet another level of expectations.

The expectations evoked by the first eight bars of "Old Folks at Home" and countless other songs require no musical training to understand. But simple tunes as such do not evoke the sacred, whatever their sacred associations might be. Fortunately for students as well as teachers of music, the most pedagogical of composers, J.S. Bach, left us more than 150 works of sacred music whose purpose is to show how a simple hymn-tune can be prolonged in a more complex structure in a way that evokes the sacred. These are the chorale preludes and related chorale settings, which embed church hymns in a longer work. By choosing hymns as raw material for transformation, Bach is making a programmatic statement as well as a musical one.

Consider another melody in antecedent-consequent form, the Bach chorale " Jesus bleibet meine Freude" from Cantata 147. In the familiar work known in English as "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring," Bach embedded this hymn in an orchestral setting, extending the time frame in which the expectations of tonal and rhythmic resolution are realized. Our expectations work on two levels. On the simpler level, we have the same sort of antecedent-consequent we heard in the Foster song; and on the more complex, we have the expansion in time of the chorale through a florid accompaniment. The intrusion of a higher order of expectations on the hymn tune is what evokes the sacred.

The expected resolution of the hymn-tune, with its four-square phrasing, is displaced in time by the florid counterpoint played by the strings. The quotidian sense of time associated with the hymn-tune encounters a second set of expectations that subsume the first. The two interlocking themes transform each other, shifting the rhythmic placement of voice-leading resolution. Bach, in effect, has introduced a higher order of time, in which a second set of expectations breaks in on the first.

It subordinates an individual melody to a voice-leading structure that also accommodates other melodies (or the same melody sung with displacement in time or pitch). Imitative counterpoint is not mathematical but rather programmatic. It begins with one set of expectations embodied in a single line of music and subsumes them in a larger voice-leading structure.

Western composers abandoned teleology in music at the same time they turned away from Christianity. Tonality enabled music to create deep expectations about the future. With the abandonment of tonality, listeners lost their map of the musical future, and found themselves trapped in a sort of Blind Man's Bluff of a perpetual musical present.

######

The chromaticism of Tristan und Isolde was parasitic on the deeply ingrained sense of time and resolution that the musical culture of the past centuries had accumulated in the collective memory of Europeans. The beauty of the sunset, after all, is still derivative of the sun. There can be no sunset without the sun.

http://www.firstthings.com/article/2010/11/why-we-cant-hear-wagnerrsquos-music

"Endless melody" was Wagner's rubric for his own style, in contradistinction to classical form. But if a melody has no end, it cannot have a middle-or, indeed, any inherent differentiation in time. It is like a picture without perspective, in which all objects hover in an undefined space. Nietzsche derided "endless melody" as "the complete degeneration of rhythmical feeling" and "chaos in the place of rhythm." Too often, "endless melody" in Wagner simply means "interminable recitatives." Nonetheless, Wagner accomplished something striking enough to provoke Baudelaire's outburst of wonder. Wagner created the illusion of timelessness-that is, of a musical moment that transcends time-but he did so with the tools of classical composition, with the presumption that his listener expects to hear the long-term teleology of goal-oriented motion.

Retrospectively, we reinterpret the B3 as a leading tone in C major, which resolves upward in the expected way; the grandly announced E-minor chord that so beguiled us was not really a chord at all but, rather, temporary support for the passing motion of the seventh to the eighth step. We thought we were in one place and, to our surprise, find ourselves in another-a purely musical evocation of the passage from a sleeping to a waking state. It is, both literally and figuratively, "somewhere over the rainbow" in reverse: As the leading tone rises to the tonic in its delayed resolution, we return from dream to reality.

Brünnhilde's awakening alters a well-worn compositional gesture to achieve a novel effect, which we might call retrospective reinterpretation. We hear backward from the eventual resolution to C major. Musical time has virtually stopped, for we stand transfixed at the juncture of two states: Brünnhilde's somnolent divinity and her awakening into mortality. It is a musical effect that breaks up the longer-range motion of the work rather than propelling it forward.

The novelty in Wagner's cleverest moments, therefore, does not stem from harmonic innovation-he resorts to well-worn devices of classical composition-but, rather, from temporal manipulation. Wagner takes for granted that his audience expects the classical resolution of voice-leading tension and will reinterpret his initially ambiguous material after the fact within the framework of classical expectations. But that raises a paradox: Wagner's shift away from goal-oriented motion to intensification of the moment deafens our ears to the expectations embedded in classical composition and ultimately ruins our ability to hear his manipulation of these expectations. In other words, Wagner's aesthetic purpose is at war with his methods. Once we are conditioned to hear music as a succession of moments rather than as a journey to a goal, we lose the capacity for retrospective reinterpretation, for such reinterpretation presumes a set of expectations conditioned by classical form in the first place. Despite his dependence on classical methods, Wagner's new temporal aesthetic weakened the capacity of later musical audiences to hear classical music. As Sir Thomas Beecham joked, people really don't like music; they just like the way it sounds.

########

The feeling of the suspension of time is only made possible by the feeling of time; it is the abruptness of the stop that makes it evocative of anything; time cannot be suspended forever, for that would to be time. When all time is suspended no time is suspended, time disappears altogether.



ComposerOfAvantGarde said:


> I could write more, but I don't want to drag this out into a huge essay. I guess my questions to those that enjoy (and perhaps also compose!) tonal muisc would be: Have you ever heard a tonal work from *before 1900* that pushed the limits to expression through *tone colour and cluster chords*, complex polyrhythms or other elements typical to atonal music? Do you feel strongly enough about tonal music to suggest that a *Ligeti* enthusiast should never listen to atonal music again?


Why before 1900? Why not before 1930? The tone colors in Ravel, Debussy, Mahler, and Strauss (combined with harmony of course) are for more expressive than Ligeti's. There's a dizzying exploration of color in 20th century music, just like how a scientist can mathematically paint a painting with far more gradations of colors than Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel. The science of light and color has made that possible, but it doesn't mean that he trumps Michelangelo or that his art is the art of the future. I don't deny that he has ventured into unexplored terrain with moderate success, but they evoke odd, haunting moods at best.



> What is the point of writing with tonality now?


The same reason for holding a candlelight vigil at midnight.


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## Petwhac (Jun 9, 2010)

There's an interesting book called 'Breaking The Sound Barrier' by the composer John Winsor. Many here including I, will disagree with some of his views but he makes two observations that I find quite persuasive and which are related to the article that brianwalker linked to. 
"Music represents biological rhythm" and listeners' want to "vicariously participate in the act of composition". 

As for tonality not being universal? Not until it is discovered, brought to one's attention or developed. After that, very few want to abandon it. Sort of like electricity. It's generally considered very handy though it is possible to do without it.


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## Petwhac (Jun 9, 2010)

Sid James said:


> It is wierd how guys like Wagner were virtually 'atonal,' esp. in his later operas, yet we don't 'blame' him for everything under the sun such as we do the atonalists, esp. Schoenberg.


I can't think of a single passage or even a phrase in either Parsifal or Meistersinger that is even remotely atonal.


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## brianwalker (Dec 9, 2011)

ComposerOfAvantGarde said:


> That is an absurd thought. Even though this isn't dodecaphonic, I think the music in it is far more expressive than any opera by Strauss:


Ligeti's technique has a wider expressive range in certain dimensions, but it's not very beautiful.

Beauty and expressiveness are not the same thing, mind you. Joyce's Ulysses is an incredibly expressive, ugly book.



Sid James said:


> It is wierd how guys like Wagner were virtually 'atonal,' esp. in his later operas, yet we don't 'blame' him for everything under the sun such as we do the atonalists, esp. Schoenberg.


No he wasn't, unless you stretch the word "virtually" to infinite bounds whereby it becomes meaningless and could be interpreted to mean that Bach was also "virtually atonal" because of variation 25 in the Goldberg Variations or that Mozart was "virtually atonal" in the last movement of the Jupiter symphony. Wagner was never even remotely atonal in the way that middle period Schoenberg was, much less Berg and Webern. Moreover Wagner wrote music dramas which follows a different way of listening and interpreting than Schoenberg's absolute music.* Wagner used the plot and text of his music dramas to allow modulations to work in a way that would not work otherwise.* Read Carolyn Abbate's analysis of the Scene Five, Act II of Gotterdammerung or her article on Tristan und Isolde scholarship; the Tristan-as-Symphony is a myth. Meistersinger unfolds in large diatonic paragraphs and Parsifal is mostly diatonic too although chromaticism is infused in its veins. You're basing Wagner no on what you've listened but caricatures of the Tristan Chord and other supplemental readings on how he was a precursor to the Second Viennese School.



> One can even think of Schoenberg being a development of Wagner's experimentations, with guys like Mahler and Zemlinsky as in-betweens, not going 'all the way' like Schoenberg, Berg, Webern did.


Wagner's modulations were never meant to be carried outside of music dramas. What he saw of the appropriations of his own modulations in works outside of opera. Schoenberg perverted Wagner's legacy.

Wagner put it in much less flowery terms. He lived long enough to observe the new generation of symphonists, and with a mixture of egotism and astuteness saw them as imitators 'misreading' his work. He wrote about them in 'On the Application of Music to Drama':

Erstaunen wir dann wieder iiber die Unbegrenztheit dieser Fahigkeiten, sobald sie in richtiger Verwendung auf das Drama entfaltet werden, so verwirren wir jene Gesetze, wenn wir die Ausbeute der musikalischen Neuerungen auf dem dramatischen Gebiete auf die Symphonie usw. iibertragen wollen.38 

[If we are once more amazed at the unlimited potential of these [musical] capabilities - when generated in their proper application in drama - so do we transgress certain rules if we take these treasures of musical novelties out of the realm of drama, and try to bring them into the symphony.] 

He heard in those symphonies what we might hear: adaptations of chromatic harmony, tonal ambiguities deliberately exploited, juxtaposition of unrelated gestures. And they are called ill-conceived, for a metaphorical musical language has been transferred to an instrumental world where it must remain incompre- hensible, like an empty ritual whose original significance has been lost to time. Another such remark was recorded in Cosima's diaries: 'at lunch R. explained how differently one must work in the symphony and in music drama, where all is permissible except stupidities, since the action explains everything'.39 The two statements - one lofty, one mundane - express the same stubborn conviction.


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## Ramako (Apr 28, 2012)

The point of tonal music is to go to the tonic.


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## Guest (Oct 22, 2012)

ComposerOfAvantGarde said:


> (Okay, I'm pretty sure alot of people are scoffing at the title of this thread.  )


Yes, obviously because of its long-standing cousin asking "what is the point of atonal?" I'm not sure whether in either case, the return question has been asked: is this a rhetorical question, because you think that tonal music is pointless? Or are you seriously asking whether any specific "point" ('purpose? value?) can be defined for tonal music that doesn't also apply to any other?



ComposerOfAvantGarde said:


> I have made an effort on a few occasions to really listen to tonal music and witness the superior range of expression conservative listeners claim it has.


Is it only 'conservative' listeners that make such claims? If so, what kind of claims are being made by 'non-conservative' listeners? (whatever that animal looks like!)



ComposerOfAvantGarde said:


> Classical music was finally realised with atonality.


"Realised"? Do you mean, "reached its peak?" (and is now in decline?) Or "found its true meaning? (and all that went before was falsehood)?


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## neoshredder (Nov 7, 2011)

This was obviously a reaction to the "What is the point of Atonal musc" thread. I'd say CoAG made his point. You can have arguments on both sides. The ending story though is both styles have a point and can be enjoyable.


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## Guest (Oct 22, 2012)

some guy said:


> Neither tonal music nor our responses to it can be instinctive, though they might seem natural. But it doesn't take all that long for something to come to seem totally natural.


You're right to want posters to be more precise about the way they use language. For example, I can't see where anyone has included music other than "classical" in their exchanges over what is/isn't tonal/atonal, and so made incomplete claims about what "the point of tonal" is. (I'd cite brianwalker's essay for example.)

However, defining and redefining every term makes ordinary discussion a bit of a challenge. I presume, for example, that where the word 'instinct' has been used, it could actually mean 'natural'. But I think I'm happy with the notion that has been offered here and elsewhere that sounds and sound combinations generate instinctive - ie, physiological - responses, and, by way of shorthand, certain sounds and combinations of sounds generate a physiological response that is more of a turn on than a turn off.

(I'm trying to find the book I read a while back on the physiological impact of music - I'll post it here when I do.)

[FOUND IT! _Music and the Mind_ by Anthony Storr, and it wasn't 'a while back' it was 9 years ago!]


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## Ramako (Apr 28, 2012)

I like tonal music.


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## mud (May 17, 2012)

Pragmatically, tonal and atonal music have the same point: inspiring people to buy it.


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## neoshredder (Nov 7, 2011)

I like good tonal music.  It's all in the delivery.


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## Ramako (Apr 28, 2012)

neoshredder said:


> I like good tonal music.  It's all in the delivery.


That is true, bad tonal music is rarely enjoyable


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## Guest (Oct 22, 2012)

neoshredder said:


> This was obviously a reaction to the "What is the point of Atonal musc" thread. I'd say CoAG made his point. You can have arguments on both sides. The ending story though is both styles have a point and can be enjoyable.


Nevertheless, the reaction prompted 40+ posts, many of which made reasonable 'non-parody' points, and even COAG did not merely parody, I thought.


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## neoshredder (Nov 7, 2011)

Yeah he was going through a weird atonal phase. He hated everything tonal at that time. Now, it seems he can't get enough of tonal music.


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## palJacky (Nov 27, 2010)

<<Pragmatically, tonal and atonal music have the same point: inspiring people to buy it. >>>
can't we at least pretend and say "inspiring people to LISTEN TO it...


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## mud (May 17, 2012)

palJacky said:


> <<Pragmatically, tonal and atonal music have the same point: inspiring people to buy it. >>>
> can't we at least pretend and say "inspiring people to LISTEN TO it...


Yes, but then we would be discussing aesthetics and not pragmatics (which seem to play an equal part). Many of the composers were starving artists even after becoming famous. That has to be factored into what they composed, and why music keeps changing.


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## Xenakiboy (May 8, 2016)

HarpsichordConcerto said:


> To have a nice romantic evening when you invite your girlfriend / boyfirend home. I mean, having when you play loud Xenakis in the background, it just doesn't work ...


Sorry to pull up this old thread but seeing this comment made me smile as it's exactly my idea of a romantic evening! 
Put on mists or the string quartets after you've set up your table in candlelight and cooked a nice dinner, put some roses somewhere in there.


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## Pugg (Aug 8, 2014)

Xenakiboy said:


> Sorry to pull up this old thread but seeing this comment made me smile as it's exactly my idea of a romantic evening!
> Put on mists or the string quartets after you've set up your table in candlelight and cooked a nice dinner, put some roses somewhere in there.


My other half would ran a mile and never to be seen again


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## Blancrocher (Jul 6, 2013)

I believe that the methods underlying common practice tonality are designed to remind us of the beauty and rationality of the natural world, and thereby to bring us a sense of peace and contentment with our position in the universe.


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

The point of tonality is to relate subservient notes to dominant notes, to create a relation or ratio, in which "1" is the main note, and the other notes become ratios of this, such as 1/2, 1/4, etc.

This could happen in other ways as well. In the case of more modern tonal systems, we could posit these ratios in other ways. If the octave is divided into 4 parts, as in a diminished scale, based on the minor third interval, then there are four of these 'stations' which divide the octave evenly.

Since the term "tonality" is an inclusive term, this encompasses many variations of systems which create tonality.

In "atonal" music, which is an exclusive term, this would mean systems which do not relate notes to a single 'master' pitch, or any reduced version of that, including 1,2,3,4,5, and 6 intervals of semitones, as in other forms of tonality. The notes would have no relation to a single note, either in toto or in groups, and would be related only to the note preceding and following it.

This "order" system of relation is inherently not harmonic, or vertical, but is exclusively horizontal, or thematic/melodic.


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

Tonal music is written to demonstrate that while all notes are equal, some notes are more equal than others.


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## smoledman (Feb 6, 2012)

Why can't one enjoy a little bit of Beatles and Ligeti? Why must it be either/or?


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## GreenMamba (Oct 14, 2012)

smoledman said:


> Why can't one enjoy a little bit of Beatles and Ligeti? Why must it be either/or?


Because even a child can tell you that accessible music such as this...






Can't be reconciled with weird, academic, elitist experimentation:

http://goo.gl/MiIpKR


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