# How Atonal Music "Works"



## millionrainbows

After Schoenberg produced his Wagnerian works, Gurrelieder, Transfigured Night, Pelleas und Mellisande, etc, he went into what is called his "freely atonal" period.

"Freely atonal" means that this music was composed outside the bounds of the tonal system. It means "not tonal," as I have always asserted.

Functional tonality is representative of a basic scale formation, within which certain hierarchies prevail, expressed and experienced as points of stability and instability. Certain tones and chords suggest stability and rest, while others imply motion to or away from these goals.

In short, traditional tonality implies that every melodic and harmonic combination of tones has a definable relationship to every other such formation. Every musical event has a functional relationship to what came before, and what will happen next. Simple expectation, using direction and motion.

How does atonal music work, in the absence of tonality? In Schoenberg's case, thematic elements assume the structural force formerly provided by tonality.

There can still be simple thematic development, but now they function as independent entities. There is no more assumed tonal context. Everything must work independently, as unique melodic and intervallic events.

It would be a mistake to try to hear Schoenberg's free-atonal works as being somehow "tonal" or "tonal sounding", or to give them any king of tonal meaning whatsoever. They use melodic and thematic means to achieve their meaning.

Confusion can arise: all of this thematic thinking (in Schoenberg), occurs within the context of the phrase-structure and rhythmic procedures of the preceding late-Romantic era. This aspect of the Second Viennese School is frequently mistaken for some manifestation of tonality, but the music is composed outside the realm of tonality; it is thus aptly called "atonal."


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## millionrainbows

The main point to remember is that tonality is based on major/minor scales, with triads built on these creating an hierarchy.

The hierarchy is graded in importance by the relation of the scale step upon which the triad is built (the root) and its relation to tonic, or I. The smaller and simpler the ratio, the more closely related and important it is in the hierarchy.

If you can see that any scale can be treated in this way, like jazz players do it, with triads built on the steps of other and exotic scales, which also form an hierarchy naturally, then you can see how Common Practice Tonality has no exclusive right to this principle of hierarchies formed from scales.

Thus, in modernism we see the creation of these 'outside the box' tonalities. Debussy and Stravinsky were doing this. Thus, their music is harmonically derived, for the most part.

This is exactly what The Second Viennese composers sought to avoid. They were not concerned with creating harmonically-derived alternate tonalities from materials like the whole-tone set (scale); they went for motivic and melodic material.

This was a throwback to pre-tonality; tonality was a recent development and a recent way of thinking in "functions" instead of melodically and polyphonically.

This is what distinguishes the structure and the sound of 12-tone music, and is why it is called 'atonal.' Other harmonically-derived music like Debussy and Stravinsky sounds vaguely tonal and familiar by comparison, because it is creating "artificial tonalities" which are harmonically derived.


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## Vox Gabrieli

The line of harmonic demarkation comes soon after Wagner's reign. Debussy, Schoenberg, and Stravinsky were the lead pathfinders to initiate the contemporary era of music. This started with the Wagner's destruction of chromaticism, as millionrainbows described with dodecaphony method. Initially, the modulation to other tonalities were seen as only temporary, eventually coming back to tonic. 

Schoenberg drew the conclusions with this "harmonic ambiguity" by abandoning tonality all together. This was commonly referred to as tonality, although Schoenberg himself did not approve of the term. The word continues to be used nonetheless, more out of convenience.


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## millionrainbows

Well, Stravinsky, when he was writing polyphonically, but maybe not even then. He eventually used the 12-tone system.

I think Stravinsky finally saw that, in pure music terms, he was never going to be able to create anything more than a "new kind of the same old tonality" if he remained in the harmonic realm of scales and triad functions built on those steps.


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## millionrainbows

I will reiterate that 12-tone and serial music assume a musical language _not _built on hierarchies created out of harmonic considerations. It is based on the discreet pitches of the 12-note chromatic gamut, and as such it is approached that way, in set theory, as sets of pitches. We can say that _intervals_ are the 'harmonic' content of serialization, as relationships abstracted from specific pitch identities. These intervals will also be discreet and separate from any hierarchical reference to a single pitch or pitch station.

As such, serial music and music based on the above principles will always sound "atonal" and will not create an overriding sense of tonality. If it does produce emphasis on localized tone centers or pitch-centricities, these will also be discreet as "intervallic shapes" and as smaller, cycling intervallic divisions of the chromatic, independent from any single pitch reference. As such, these will be _independent templates_ or shapes which move freely. There will be no dominating pitch reference or "tonality" in this kind of music.

Otherwise, music created from harmonic considerations, creating an hierarchy of reference, will always sound like some form of tonality.


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