# Help me see the emotion in non tonal music



## Manok (Aug 29, 2011)

I do not wish this to become a slam against atonal, or non tonal music, because I will just as happily listen to either tonal, or non tonal variants. I have often found that it's hard to find an emotion in non tonal music. I was wondering if you perhaps found the emotions I've been seeking lately in that type of music? Is there emotion to be found there?


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## Bettina (Sep 29, 2016)

This is something that I struggle with too. I don't have any answers - I just wanted to chime in to say that I'm looking forward to reading the responses to your question. The emotional vocabulary of tonal music resonates with me in a way that atonal music doesn't. In many tonal pieces, dissonance is a powerful signal of pain, or yearning, or anxiety, depending on the context...but how would such feelings be represented in atonal music, where dissonance is the norm?


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## Art Rock (Nov 28, 2009)

Try Berg's violin concerto.


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## Daniel Atkinson (Dec 31, 2016)

Show me any music that doesn't have emotion and you may have discovered the ark of the covenant. 


Daniel


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## ST4 (Oct 27, 2016)

Manok said:


> I do not wish this to become a slam against atonal, or non tonal music, because I will just as happily listen to either tonal, or non tonal variants. I have often found that it's hard to find an emotion in non tonal music. I was wondering if you perhaps found the emotions I've been seeking lately in that type of music? Is there emotion to be found there?


*YES*

Next question


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## Larkenfield (Jun 5, 2017)

Emotions can't be forced. It's possible there _is_ no emotion in the conventional sense of what you're hearing, depending upon the work, and I think it's important to allow room for that and some suspension of judgment. These composers were opening up something new in human experience, like a new dimension of reality or the mind, that may never have been outwardly expressed before; and in my own experience, I believe that some of it is certainly not related to the conventional emotions but perhaps more to the emotions such as anxiety or disquiet that can literally be disconcerting or unsettling, though some of the people who generally like the music may be reluctant to admit that side of it, or are having a completely different experience. I feel it's more important not to superimpose any expectations on listeners with regard to what they're _supposed_ to find or feel, but rather to be honest in their genuine reactions as part of the journey of self-discovery. I would even go as far to say that one doesn't have to _like_ the music in order to somehow be enlightened by it. Schoenberg said that his music was an expression of the _subconscious_: "This music seeks to express all that dwells within us subconsciously, " at least with regard to his _Five Pieces_ _for Orchestra_.


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## Portamento (Dec 8, 2016)

Unsuk Chin's Violin Concerto is one of the most optimistic "non-tonal" pieces I know...






...and Fartein Valen's Second Symphony is one of the darkest.






Maybe tonal music has a slightly broader spectrum of emotions than atonal, but the latter can accomplish a great deal as well.


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## St Matthew (Aug 26, 2017)

This thread sucks because I actually struggle with so much tonal music, which just seems emotionally empty to me


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## Nereffid (Feb 6, 2013)

I essentially agree with those who say that all music has emotion in it - well, splitting hairs, I'd say it's not so much that the music has emotion in it, but that we can respond emotionally to the music. But I think it's fair to say that not all kinds of music are equally interested in the direct and obvious eliciting of particular emotions at particular moments, and that some kinds of music are more interested in some emotions over others. You're not going to find the emotional rollercoaster of a Mahler symphony in a Bach fugue, are you, so why hold all music to the same supposed standards?

By the way, it's often the case with these sorts of threads that the OP is a little vague - here we just have a reference to "atonal, or non tonal music", so without some more specific examples, I'm not exactly sure whether we're talking about Xenakis or Martinu.


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

Seems to me that a lot of music appeals not because it elicits emotions, but because it evokes interesting states of mind or is just plain esthetically pleasing. Why is Fur Elise so popular?


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## tortkis (Jul 13, 2013)

New music explores new emotions. I love that ambiguous, suspended, terrifying feelings that adventurous music gives. Some works bring totally unique emotions which are difficult to describe and cannot be felt by other types of music. The works of Stockhausen, Machaut, Satie, (early) Riley and Reich still give me the confusing, frightening and refreshing feelings I felt when I first heard them.

I also like a certain kind of music, such as Cage's chance operation pieces, especially because it is free of strong emotions. I just enjoy the wonderful sounds.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Manok said:


> I do not wish this to become a slam against atonal, or non tonal music, because I will just as happily listen to either tonal, or non tonal variants. I have often found that it's hard to find an emotion in non tonal music. I was wondering if you perhaps found the emotions I've been seeking lately in that type of music? Is there emotion to be found there?


I'm always a bit reluctant to make suggestions about this sort of thing because I'm not so good at spotting whether a piece of music is tonal. But nevertheless, have you heard the largo from Schoenberg's 4th string quartet? The emotional content may well vary from one performer to another of course, the one I'm thinking of is The Leipzig String Quartet. Schoenberg's music generally seems very emotionally rich and varied and humane to me.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Manok said:


> I do not wish this to become a slam against atonal, or non tonal music, because I will just as happily listen to either tonal, or non tonal variants. I have often found that it's hard to find an emotion in non tonal music. I was wondering if you perhaps found the emotions I've been seeking lately in that type of music? Is there emotion to be found there?


Another good one to try is My Bonny Boy by Michael Finnissy, on his album called English Country Dances, which is dreamy and tender like something by Schumann. On the same album I'll Give My Love a Garland is sexually charged, like the Tristan prelude.

I don't know whether this is an emotion or not, but I think non tonal music has been outstanding at evoking a "spiritual" feeling. You may be interested to try Horatio Radilescu's 5th string quartet, there's a fine recording by The Jack Quartet.


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## schigolch (Jun 26, 2011)

Emotion is in the ears, and the brain, of the listener.

Surely, there are quite a few recipes developed during centuries to elicit emotions, and different kind of emotions, that a composer can or can't use. But in the end, it's you who feels this emotion, or not.

Personally, if I'm looking for emotions, and this "non-tonal music" is not providing these emotions, I wouldn't listen to it. Problem solved.


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## eugeneonagain (May 14, 2017)

Bettina said:


> In many tonal pieces, dissonance is a powerful signal of pain, or yearning, or anxiety, depending on the context...but how would such feelings be represented in atonal music, where dissonance is the norm?


This is a fair observation, but there is also resolution in tonally ambiguous music. It doesn't always move from one dissonance to another without respite. I'm not sure what we are including here under the label 'atonal', but I think that there is much dodecaphonic/serial/12-tone music that elicits emotional responses.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

The assumption that music is always supposed to be about emotion is misguided. In the High Classical Era, for example, the connection to emotion was virtually severed for instrumental music. Explicitly expressive music was not widely popular, which is why the proportion of instrumental works in the minor mode was small, between 1:6 and 1:8 (Think Mozart symphonies for an even more extreme example!). The expressive relation between the major and the minor modes in this era was not so much happy/sad, light/dark, but neutral/sad. The major mode wasn't favored because people liked happy music, it was favored because they valued music with no deep commitment to emotion of any kind.

To answer the OP as it is intended I would need guidance on what is meant by atonal or non-tonal. I think it pretty obvious that all of Schoenberg's free atonal music (along with everything by Berg) is intensely charged with emotion. Not to mention the most dissonant music of Bartok, Britten, etc. - all charged with emotion. Lots of serial music has more of a Classical Era aesthetic - no essential relation to emotion intended. Is the more difficult to analyze music of Prokofiev in the non-tonal category? Shostakovich? If so, then we have a lot of subtly nuanced and varied emotional expression. Modal music by Arvo Pärt is highly expressive. Music including serial elements by Schnittke is intensely expressive. In short, a lot of modernist music is highly expressive, while much of it is made with a Classical Era sensibility, where abstract form, not emotion, is the central aesthetic value.

In response to the thread title: You aren't always supposed to be finding emotion in non-tonal music. Which music, _specifically_, are you talking about?


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## hpowders (Dec 23, 2013)

To find the emotion, you will have to do the required work. The human brain must be given time to adjust to the strange new intervals of sounds.

Repetition and more repetition.

It took me quite a while but I can finally say I do find "emotion" in the Berg Violin Concerto, Berg's great opera Wozzeck and the Schoenberg Piano Concerto. They are all very moving works...once the brain adjusts.


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## Manxfeeder (Oct 19, 2010)

Larkenfield said:


> Schoenberg said that his music was an expression of the _subconscious_: "This music seeks to express all that dwells within us subconsciously, " at least with regard to his _Five Pieces_ _for Orchestra_.


I've heard that Impressionism is concerned with the present moment and Expressionism is concerned with the present psychological moment. Schoenberg's Five Pieces is definitely expressing the shifting emotions we all go through. I would also include Webern's Six Pieces for Orchestra, especially directed by Karajan. You would be hard pressed not to feel at least _some_ emotion at some point in those works, whether it is fright or peacefulness.


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## eugeneonagain (May 14, 2017)

EdwardBast said:


> The assumption that music is always supposed to be about emotion is misguided. In the High Classical Era, for example, the connection to emotion was virtually severed for instrumental music. Explicitly expressive music was not widely popular, which is why the proportion of instrumental works in the minor mode was small, between 1:6 and 1:8 (Think Mozart symphonies for an even more extreme example!). The expressive relation between the major and the minor modes in this era was not so much happy/sad, light/dark, but neutral/sad. The major mode wasn't favored because people liked happy music, it was favored because they valued music with no deep commitment to emotion of any kind.


This is very true. The small number of of Mozart's minor works are seized upon as music expressing this or that emotional event in his life. Though this connection was likely never made during his lifetime or for quite a while afterwards.


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## Gordontrek (Jun 22, 2012)

Excellent question, and I really don't have a good answer. Atonality, in my view, can indeed express emotion when used right. To echo others I find much of Schoenberg and Bartok to be very emotional, usually an angry, longing, or confused sentiment. Others are more thoughtful and reflective but I usually detect stronger emotions. 
But I also think, and this might get me stormed on, that atonal music has nothing near the emotional power or range of more tonal music. I would say that the most powerful music lies somewhere in the middle. Debussy's orchestral music, while categorized as tonal, has a ton of post-tonal elements in it. But it's some of the most electrifying stuff you'll ever hear.


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## Phil loves classical (Feb 8, 2017)

Here is a good article on the limits of atonal music.

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/atonal-music-and-its-limits/

Atonal music is limited in its emotional expressive range. First time I listened to the Berg Violin Concerto, I didn't hear any emotion in particular. Over time, the phrasing and mannerisms are similar as in tonal music, so I was able to infer a certain emotion from the piece, especially since knowing the background in the composition. So atonal music may be able to project certain emotions, but it is apart from its atonality, and more in the phrasing (rhythms, vibrato, etc.). Atonal music inherently sounds uncertain and ambiguous, and is more dependent on other musical features to project its message.

Personally, I don't focus too much on perceived emotions from atonal music, but on the organization of sounds, etc. whether it is more clear or ambiguous, and not try to force any emotion or specific message out of it when there may not really be one.

Atonal music can make use of sound pitch, but not with harmonic organization in mind.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Phil loves classical said:


> Here is a good article on the limits of atonal music.
> 
> https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/atonal-music-and-its-limits/
> 
> ...


I just couldn't see the argument in that paper for the idea that non tonal music has more limited emotional possiblities (I noticed an assertion along those lines), it's a long paper and I may have missed it, would you mind cutting and pasting it for me.


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## Manok (Aug 29, 2011)

EdwardBast said:


> The assumption that music is always supposed to be about emotion is misguided. In the High Classical Era, for example, the connection to emotion was virtually severed for instrumental music. Explicitly expressive music was not widely popular, which is why the proportion of instrumental works in the minor mode was small, between 1:6 and 1:8 (Think Mozart symphonies for an even more extreme example!). The expressive relation between the major and the minor modes in this era was not so much happy/sad, light/dark, but neutral/sad. The major mode wasn't favored because people liked happy music, it was favored because they valued music with no deep commitment to emotion of any kind.
> 
> To answer the OP as it is intended I would need guidance on what is meant by atonal or non-tonal. I think it pretty obvious that all of Schoenberg's free atonal music (along with everything by Berg) is intensely charged with emotion. Not to mention the most dissonant music of Bartok, Britten, etc. - all charged with emotion. Lots of serial music has more of a Classical Era aesthetic - no essential relation to emotion intended. Is the more difficult to analyze music of Prokofiev in the non-tonal category? Shostakovich? If so, then we have a lot of subtly nuanced and varied emotional expression. Modal music by Arvo Pärt is highly expressive. Music including serial elements by Schnittke is intensely expressive. In short, a lot of modernist music is highly expressive, while much of it is made with a Classical Era sensibility, where abstract form, not emotion, is the central aesthetic value.
> 
> In response to the thread title: You aren't always supposed to be finding emotion in non-tonal music. Which music, _specifically_, are you talking about?


I prefer non-tonal rather than atonal on this forum, because atonal is a charged word with some people. non-tonal simply refers to music without a tonal center. I just have a hard time figuring out what the emotion is supposed to be when there is no tonal center at all. Music should not be a purely technical exercise.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

It's a popular but incorrect assumption that music "contains" specific emotions. Music contains only sounds and dynamic patterns which suggest and evoke emotions in listeners, and even though certain sounds and patterns seem to relate more to some emotional states than to others, they cannot be precisely descriptive of such states, nor uniformly evocative of specific emotions across listeners. 

Psychologists recognize a phenomenon they term "cross-domain mapping, wherein mental patterns abstracted from one perceptual mode are perceived analogously in another. Thus we recognize "dynamics" and "movement" in the static forms of the visual arts, and "weight" or "transparency" in the sounds of music. By this principle we recognize the dynamic patterns of emotional life in the forms of art, and particularly of music which, like emotion, unfolds in time. But because real-life emotions are contextual and involve an element of valuation ("is this experience good or bad?"), the dynamic patterns of music, lacking a context of life experience, can't correspond to specific emotions but can only provide sensory metaphors (dissonant or consonant? dark or bright? loud or soft? fast or slow?) of emotion which help to limit the interpretations we can place upon them and so arrive at a personal emotional response. 

The particular emotion any given listener will find in a piece of music will be determined partly by the internal features of the music and partly by the listener's grasp of those features, as well as by his prior experiences and psychological makeup. This explains why there should be widespread general, categorical similarities in what different listeners think a piece of music is expressing, but at the same time great differences in the specific interpretations listeners make within those broad categories of meaning, as well as enormous, even irreconcilable, differences in valuation and taste.

There's no reason why music has to be tonal to be capable of suggesting emotional states or of eliciting emotion. Any sort of music may trace dynamic patterns recognizable to the mind, through "cross-domain mapping," as corresponding to states of feeling, and tonal and atonal music can share many such patterns. However, a harmonic system built upon a tonal center or reference point, with its perceptible function of representing a state of repose (perfect consonance) from which all other states are departures and thus represent degrees of instability and tension (dissonance), is a striking structural metaphor for the basic pattern of emotional experience, and allows the creation of structural metaphors for states and progressions of states - expressive narratives, so to speak - which the more constantly dissonant harmony of atonal music, restricting or eliminating the degree of consonant resolution and perceived stability, and thus the "pull" of the tension-resolution dynamic, cannot, at least to the same degree. We can observe, even within types of harmony recognizable as tonal, that degrees of clarity or ambiguity in the perceived tonal function of chords and progressions take us into very different expressive domains, so it shouldn't be surprising that atonal harmony, which goes beyond ambiguity to suspend our sense that a stable, consonant state of repose is an operative or possible goal, should convey a peculiar range of expressive meaning, and one that many listeners to tonal music would not recognize or be comfortable with.


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## Botschaft (Aug 4, 2017)

EdwardBast said:


> The assumption that music is always supposed to be about emotion is misguided. In the High Classical Era, for example, the connection to emotion was virtually severed for instrumental music. Explicitly expressive music was not widely popular, which is why the proportion of instrumental works in the minor mode was small, between 1:6 and 1:8 (Think Mozart symphonies for an even more extreme example!). The expressive relation between the major and the minor modes in this era was not so much happy/sad, light/dark, but neutral/sad. The major mode wasn't favored because people liked happy music, it was favored because they valued music with no deep commitment to emotion of any kind.


Granted: emotion wasn't given quite the precedence it was in the Romantic period, but I don't think we owe all those exultant, humorous and bittersweet moments to them valuing "music with no deep commitment to emotion of any kind", which seems like gross hyperbole at best.

As for atonal music: don't expect to be able to uproot tradition while retaining much of its fruits.


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## 20centrfuge (Apr 13, 2007)

I think that by listening to lots of different works, you will find some that speak to you more than others, just like in tonal music.

I'm personally not fond of the words atonal or non-tonal. I believe that most every work has it's own hierarchy of notes (some notes being more important than others), even if those hierarchies only last for a few seconds (rather than whole movements).

Music that is entirely lacking in terms of any note hierarchy feels quite random, and, I believe is not inherently as enjoyable. 

A work that I would suggest is Rihm's Phantom und Eskapade for Violin and Piano.


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## St Matthew (Aug 26, 2017)

First Question: How can this question be answered when emotion in tonal music is impossible to answer?

Second Question: How can you put 150 years of completely unique and diverse music into one basket? Do you do this with "tonal" music too?

Third Question: Do you listen to this music regularly and still struggle with it? I have the immediate impression that you, and many other don't, therefore basing their opinions on occasional brief listens to this music

Fourth Question: Why would "atonal" music be any fundamentally different to "tonal" music in regards to this topic, music is music. Music is always music, regardless of any theoretical conversation. It resonated strongly with people who love it and means a lot personally.

Fifth Question: How can you disregard the 1st person, personal layer to music? not all "tonal" music will make an impression on you, not all "tonal" music will give you an emotionally rewarding experience, would you base your entire outlook on "tonal" music on several brief experiences with "tonal" music? vice versa with "atonal" music?

Sixth Question: Is this thread necessary?


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

St Matthew said:


> First Question: How can this question be answered when emotion in tonal music is impossible to answer?
> 
> Second Question: How can you put 150 years of completely unique and diverse music into one basket? Do you do this with "tonal" music too?
> 
> ...


First answer: Yes.

Second answer: Not sure anyone's doing that. See fifth answer.

Third answer: OP says he listens to both "happily."

Fourth answer: There are great differences between different kinds of music. Whether they're "fundamental" depends on what aspect of music we're looking at and in what context. If our context is harmonic organization, the presence or absence of a tonal center and tonal hierarchy might be considered fundamental.

Fifth answer: There's a good question here: how much can we generalize about "tonal" and "atonal" music? trying to answer it leads to a discussion of how music produces an emotional experience and how different kinds of music, by being differently constructed, may have different expressive capabilities. I offered a few thoughts on this in post #27 above, and I invite comment.

Sixth answer: Is anything necessary?


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## Phil loves classical (Feb 8, 2017)

Mandryka said:


> I just couldn't see the argument in that paper for the idea that non tonal music has more limited emotional possiblities (I noticed an assertion along those lines), it's a long paper and I may have missed it, would you mind cutting and pasting it for me.


"Is atonal music also capable of successfully expressing the wider range of normal human action and emotion? The experience of nearly eighty years suggests that the answer is no. In spite of Schoenberg's claim that atonal music is "not devoid of gaiety or humor," a convincing atonal comic opera has yet to be written, and subjects of a noble or tragic character have not fared much better; most atonal composers, like the rest of us, find it difficult to imagine an atonal Marriage of Figaro or Romeo and Juliet.

_____________

In spite of the obvious expressive limitations of atonality, Schoenberg insisted throughout his life that atonal music would eventually be accepted by concert audiences. Needless to say, Schoenberg's hope is unlikely to be fulfilled. The reason is simple: atonality is not very well suited to expressing things traditionally considered "beautiful." In fact, the word beauty almost never occurs in discussions of atonal music, even among its most avid partisans. This is not really surprising, for Schoenberg himself spoke of being "cured of the delusion that the artist's aim is to create beauty." One may, of course, assert that being cured of such delusions is just what audiences deserve; this was the position of Theodor Adorno, who wrote that "the dissonances which horrify them testify to their own condition." Such an attitude, however, does scant justice to the traditions of Western music and the experience of those who know it well."


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Phil loves classical said:


> "*Is atonal music also capable of successfully expressing the wider range of normal human action and emotion? The experience of nearly eighty years suggests that the answer is no.* In spite of Schoenberg's claim that atonal music is "not devoid of gaiety or humor," a convincing atonal comic opera has yet to be written, and subjects of a noble or tragic character have not fared much better; most atonal composers, like the rest of us, find it difficult to imagine an atonal Marriage of Figaro or Romeo and Juliet.
> 
> _____________
> In spite of the obvious expressive limitations of atonality, Schoenberg insisted throughout his life that atonal music would eventually be accepted by concert audiences. Needless to say, Schoenberg's hope is unlikely to be fulfilled. The reason is simple: atonality is not very well suited to expressing things traditionally considered "beautiful." In fact, the word beauty almost never occurs in discussions of atonal music, even among its most avid partisans. This is not really surprising, for Schoenberg himself spoke of being "cured of the delusion that the artist's aim is to create beauty." One may, of course, assert that being cured of such delusions is just what audiences deserve; this was the position of Theodor Adorno, who wrote that "the dissonances which horrify them testify to their own condition." Such an attitude, however, does scant justice to the traditions of Western music and the experience of those who know it well."


Prokofiev, who certainly never shied away from dissonance and whose style is full of fascinating harmonic surprises, said this about tonal and atonal music:

"Beyond doubt I have been guilty of atonality. But one thing I must say. When I came to recognize that the tonal structure of a piece of music is to be compared with building on a solid foundation, whereas atonality is a building on sand, it was not long before a striving towards tonal writing began to show itself in my music. _Apart from this, tonal or diatonic music offers a far wider range of possibilities than the atonal and the chromatic._ How far this is true we can judge from the blind alley into which Sch6nberg and his young men have allowed their principles to drag them. In some of my work during the last year you will find isolated moments of atonality. While I had no sympathy for this kind of thing, I nevertheless made use of it in order that the value of tonal writing might be brought out all the more strongly by the effect of contrast."

Copland remarked that atonal music tended to sound "too much like itself." Of course he did experiment with it, as did Stravinsky. It's at least interesting to hear the thoughts of major composers who perceived limitations in the atonal idioms with which they were acquainted.

Poetically eloquent on the subject was conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler:

On tonal music -

"The basis of the tonality is the cadenza. A certain space is encompassed by its simplest steps, one to the dominant and then to the sub-dominant and finally back to the tonic. These steps not only make a connection between one chord and the adjacent one but also - and this is crucial - they also create a greater, superior context that connects together all the links in the cadenza from its starting-off point to its end. This superior context, this space that the cadenza creates, is nothing less than the decisive element: the music can take shape, it has found a point from which it can depart and an end that it can reach. A fugue such as Bach wrote or a movement from a symphony such as Beethoven wrote represent literally a cadenza extended into gigantic proportions."

"... the cadenza arises in tonal music on the firm foundations of the triad. The tension grows out of the release of tension in order to grasp the diversity of life's forms and ultimately, according to the law that governs it, to return to the starting-off point, the so-called tonic. The more tranquil and complete the release of tension is the more powerful are the tensions that become possible on its basis. Indeed, it is only through the corresponding release of tension that must precede it that any kind of tension is possible in the first place and can be recovered afterwards. Every great piece of tonal music, therefore, despite all the excitement that can be driven to the limit of human comprehension, exudes a deep and unshakeable tranquillity that permeates everything and everyone like a memory of the majesty of God."

On atonal music -

"Accompanying an atonal musician hand-in-hand is like going through a thick forest. Along the path, weird and wonderful flowers and plants draw our attention and one does not know oneself where one has come from or where one is going. The listener is gripped by the feeling of being exposed to the power of elemental existence. There is admittedly no denying that a certain note has thus been struck in the modern human being's feeling for life."


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Phil loves classical said:


> "Is atonal music also capable of successfully expressing the wider range of normal human action and emotion? The experience of nearly eighty years suggests that the answer is no. In spite of Schoenberg's claim that atonal music is "not devoid of gaiety or humor," a convincing atonal comic opera has yet to be written, and subjects of a noble or tragic character have not fared much better; most atonal composers, like the rest of us, find it difficult to imagine an atonal Marriage of Figaro or Romeo and Juliet.
> 
> _____________
> 
> In spite of the obvious expressive limitations of atonality, Schoenberg insisted throughout his life that atonal music would eventually be accepted by concert audiences. Needless to say, Schoenberg's hope is unlikely to be fulfilled. The reason is simple: atonality is not very well suited to expressing things traditionally considered "beautiful." In fact, the word beauty almost never occurs in discussions of atonal music, even among its most avid partisans. This is not really surprising, for Schoenberg himself spoke of being "cured of the delusion that the artist's aim is to create beauty." One may, of course, assert that being cured of such delusions is just what audiences deserve; this was the position of Theodor Adorno, who wrote that "the dissonances which horrify them testify to their own condition." Such an attitude, however, does scant justice to the traditions of Western music and the experience of those who know it well."


Yes I saw that, but it doesn't look like an argument really - you know, premises, logical conclusion, that sort of thing. Anyway I gave some examples of expressive atonal music earlier in this thread, so the conclusion is false.

As far as comedy is concerned is Ligeti's Grand Macabre tonal?


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## Tallisman (May 7, 2017)

St Matthew said:


> This thread sucks because I actually struggle with so much tonal music, which just seems emotionally empty to me


OMG YAAAH, ME TOOOE, those normies are just SOOOO mainstream the only true emotion is in music that breaks free of those oppressive western tonal constructs, RIIIGHT?:lol::lol:


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## Chronochromie (May 17, 2014)

Phil loves classical said:


> "Is atonal music also capable of successfully expressing the wider range of normal human action and emotion? The experience of nearly eighty years suggests that the answer is no. In spite of Schoenberg's claim that atonal music is "not devoid of gaiety or humor," a convincing atonal comic opera has yet to be written, and subjects of a noble or tragic character have not fared much better; most atonal composers, like the rest of us, find it difficult to imagine an atonal Marriage of Figaro or Romeo and Juliet.
> 
> _____________
> 
> In spite of the obvious expressive limitations of atonality, Schoenberg insisted throughout his life that atonal music would eventually be accepted by concert audiences. Needless to say, Schoenberg's hope is unlikely to be fulfilled. The reason is simple: atonality is not very well suited to expressing things traditionally considered "beautiful." In fact, the word beauty almost never occurs in discussions of atonal music, even among its most avid partisans. This is not really surprising, for Schoenberg himself spoke of being "cured of the delusion that the artist's aim is to create beauty." One may, of course, assert that being cured of such delusions is just what audiences deserve; this was the position of Theodor Adorno, who wrote that "the dissonances which horrify them testify to their own condition." Such an attitude, however, does scant justice to the traditions of Western music and the experience of those who know it well."


I find much beauty in works by Schoenberg, Webern, Berg, Dallapiccola, Xenakis (yes), Boulez, etc. It may be unconventional but it's beauty all the same.

Re atonal comic opera, does _Le Grande Macabre_ count? I also found _Wozzeck_ to be humorous when I saw it subtitled but maybe it's just me...


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## Phil loves classical (Feb 8, 2017)

Chronochromie said:


> I find much beauty in works by Schoenberg, Webern, Berg, Dallapiccola, Xenakis (yes), Boulez, etc. It may be unconventional but it's beauty all the same.
> 
> Re atonal comic opera, does _Le Grande Macabre_ count? I also found _Wozzeck_ to be humorous when I saw it subtitled but maybe it's just me...


True. I don't quite agree with his Beauty statement, since beauy is probably the most subjective quality.


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## St Matthew (Aug 26, 2017)

Tallisman said:


> OMG YAAAH, ME TOOOE, those normies are just SOOOO mainstream the only true emotion is in music that breaks free of those oppressive western tonal constructs, RIIIGHT?:lol::lol:


WTF are you on?


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## hpowders (Dec 23, 2013)

OP: Have you tried hypnosis?


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## hpowders (Dec 23, 2013)

St Matthew said:


> WTF are you on?


Hopefully, not my girlfriend!


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## St Matthew (Aug 26, 2017)

I do struggle with a lot of tonal music. Just because it comes pre-packaged doesn't mean that I'm going to enjoy or relate to it.

The answer is blatantly obvious: Listen

It's the only true thing we can do with music, yes theory is there but you don't "experience" the theory, you experience the music itself, the notes, the sounds, the timbres and so on.

It's the same thing for any types of music from any country, any time period. The more you listen, the more familiar you become, the more you understand and hopefully enjoy (or at the least, accept)

:tiphat:


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## Botschaft (Aug 4, 2017)

Whenever I listen to atonal music I can't escape getting that swampish impression, which may have its charm, but it gets a bit tired after a while. Music can't all just be running around in magical forests trying to hide from monsters.


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## Huilunsoittaja (Apr 6, 2010)

Improbus said:


> Whenever I listen to atonal music I can't escape getting that swampish impression, which may have its charm, but it gets a bit tired after a while. Music can't all just be running around in magical forests trying to hide from monsters.


Yes. Music _does _have limitations. Not all pieces of music will evoke the totality of human experience. Usually it will express some fraction of it, a single aspect or two, just like any other pieces of _tonal _music.

Thus, the emotions that are ever evoked from listeners by post-tonal music, be it "anxiety" or "violence" as some people say, that is simply one aspect of life. It's not for all time and places. So if you need to put the music down because that's all you're getting out of it for that moment, no one should stop you. Same for people who can't stand happy music when they're feeling depressed, or depressed music when they're really happy. And if you discover other feelings as you listen to post-tonality other than the stereotypical negative emotions, may those be useful to you too.

For some people, the emotionality, or _non_-emotionality if that is appropriate word, of post-tonal music is useful to them, enriching in some way, and probably enforcing some feeling inside them just as all music tends to do. If anyone cares to actually talk about this and be _descriptive _about their emotional/non-emotional experiences, I invite you to do so. I would like to see some detailed responses, not simply "of course it's emotional! just listen for it!" I don't think that's the response the OP is looking for.

I for one can talk about it. When I hear post-tonal (and particularly avant-garde) works with a particularly negative vibe to them, it inspires compassion in me. This is usually because I don't relate to the music, I relate to other things. I don't see _me _in the avant-garde music, as my soul isn't really summarized by those negative feelings. I see _other people_. And by seeing (hearing) their pain and suffering I'm inspired to feel sympathetic and compassionate on the sufferings of others. I think Shostakovich is a prime example of that. This isn't to say I've never experienced suffering. But I don't _identify _with suffering that way, I _observe _it, from a different perspective. I'm not the composer after all. The times I _do _relate to that kind of music is usually because I've begun to identify with more universal feelings, particularly of sincerity. One can be sincerely angry, sad, anxious, confused, and I appreciate it for its realism. They are aspects of me too. But, for example, cynicism/pessimism isn't a genuine part of me, so I feel compassion for the cynical/pessimistic when hearing that music.

Let me walk through something:






In this piece, I can hear aggression, calm, confusion, determination, moments of enlightenment. But I also hear humor! The reason is this: I interpret this work as a _reproduction _of emotions, through a computer. A computer is trying to speak our language, but fails, becomes frustrated, and eventually gives up at the end and runs out of battery. Some sort of message is being said, but we'll never know for sure what it is, just a bunch of beeps and boops. I got this insight from a teacher a number of years ago, and that image has stuck in my head. I'm gonna actually perform this work next spring, and I'm excited to! So it's not all cynicism at life, I mean, that really is up to the listener/performer to decide. But I will argue that my interpretation is a bit more engaging for an audience than to present randomness for the sake of randomness and timbre experimentation and what-not.


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## mathisdermaler (Mar 29, 2017)




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## St Matthew (Aug 26, 2017)

Huilunsoittaja said:


> Yes. Music _does _have limitations. Not all pieces of music will evoke the totality of human experience. Usually it will express some fraction of it, a single aspect or two, just like any other pieces of _tonal _music.
> 
> Thus, the emotions that are ever evoked from listeners by post-tonal music, be it "anxiety" or "violence" as some people say, that is simply one aspect of life. It's not for all time and places. So if you need to put the music down because that's all you're getting out of it for that moment, no one should stop you. Same for people who can't stand happy music when they're feeling depressed, or depressed music when they're really happy. And if you discover other feelings as you listen to post-tonality other than the stereotypical negative emotions, may those be useful to you too.
> 
> ...


Maybe you are projecting your own negativity onto the music through unfamiliarity? And therefore a sense of distance to the music?


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## Huilunsoittaja (Apr 6, 2010)

St Matthew said:


> Maybe you are projecting your own negativity onto the music through unfamiliarity? And therefore a sense of distance to the music?


I sincerely doubt it in the case of many composers, especially Shostakovich. Nor would I call such music "unfamiliar" since I actually know really a lot about it from being in music school for a number of years.


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## hpowders (Dec 23, 2013)

St Matthew said:


> *I do struggle with a lot of tonal music*. Just because it comes pre-packaged doesn't mean that I'm going to enjoy or relate to it.
> 
> The answer is blatantly obvious: Listen
> 
> ...


LMAO: Struggling with tonal music!! That's a Klassik!!!


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## Huilunsoittaja (Apr 6, 2010)

hpowders said:


> LMAO: Struggling with tonal music!! That's a Klassik!!!


Could you contribute a bit more helpfully to this thread please? Maybe provide some helpful insight into your personal experiences with post-tonal music?


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## hpowders (Dec 23, 2013)

hpowders said:


> To find the emotion, you will have to do the required work. The human brain must be given time to adjust to the strange new intervals of sounds.
> 
> Repetition and more repetition.
> 
> It took me quite a while but I can finally say I do find "emotion" in the Berg Violin Concerto, Berg's great opera Wozzeck and the Schoenberg Piano Concerto. They are all very moving works...once the brain adjusts.


"Could you contribute a little more helpfully...."

I already posted the above post. Perhaps you overlooked it.


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## hpowders (Dec 23, 2013)

St Matthew said:


> I do struggle with a lot of tonal music. Just because it comes pre-packaged doesn't mean that I'm going to enjoy or relate to it.
> 
> *The answer is blatantly obvious: Listen*
> 
> ...


You are correct. No magic bullets. One must put in the time it takes to retrain the brain to accomodate unnaturally sounding intervals.

It takes time...a LOT of time! I spent months with Berg's Wozzeck, Piano Sonata and Schoenberg's Piano and Violin Concertos and now they are all among my favorite works. I never would have believed it possible on first hearings.

All one needs is an open mind to new things and the time it takes to make it happen.

Also, welcome to TC, _Matt_. You are obviously a poster to be reckoned with-intelligent, with a fine sense of humor and a _Passion_ for music!!:tiphat:


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## fluteman (Dec 7, 2015)

Huilunsoittaja said:


> Yes. Music _does _have limitations. Not all pieces of music will evoke the totality of human experience. Usually it will express some fraction of it, a single aspect or two, just like any other pieces of _tonal _music.
> 
> Thus, the emotions that are ever evoked from listeners by post-tonal music, be it "anxiety" or "violence" as some people say, that is simply one aspect of life. It's not for all time and places. So if you need to put the music down because that's all you're getting out of it for that moment, no one should stop you. Same for people who can't stand happy music when they're feeling depressed, or depressed music when they're really happy. And if you discover other feelings as you listen to post-tonality other than the stereotypical negative emotions, may those be useful to you too.
> 
> ...


One of my flutist mentors helpfully suggested one way to better understand the Sequenza for solo flute is to become familiar with the other 13 compositions in Berio's Sequenza series. I also think Berio's completion of Puccini's Turandot is worth hearing. It certainly sounds nothing like what Puccini himself would have written, but I like how he avoids the "easy way out", which is how I regard the competent but imo superficial and conventional ending that is usually used. If that was what Puccini wanted, he would have finished the opera himself well before his demise.


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## hpowders (Dec 23, 2013)

ST4 said:


> *YES*
> 
> Next question


I envy you your patience. I couldn't do it. :lol:


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## larold (Jul 20, 2017)

Listen to William Schuman's Violin Concerto played by Paul Zukofsky, Michael Tilson Thomas and the Boston Symphony:

First movement: 




Second & Third movements: 




The Alban Berg Chamber Concerto for Piano and Violin with 13 Wind Instruments is another masterpiece. The best version isn't available on YouTube. This one is adequate:


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## hpowders (Dec 23, 2013)

larold said:


> Listen to William Schuman's Violin Concerto played by Paul Zukofsky, Michael Tilson Thomas and the Boston Symphony:
> 
> First part:
> 
> ...


Except for one thing, the William Schuman Violin Concerto is an example of a tonal piece with dissonance. It is not atonal.

You want atonal violin concertos, check out Berg and Schoenberg.


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## Manok (Aug 29, 2011)

Woodduck said:


> First answer: Yes.
> 
> Second answer: Not sure anyone's doing that. See fifth answer.
> 
> ...


So, because I can't see emotion in something, means I don't listen to it hardly? Non tonal music gives me the chills on occasion, and even makes me smile, but it's never made me feel happy or sad, or any distinct emotion. I often feel as though it's nothing more than a technical exercise by the composers who wrote the music. This is not a slam against the music, it is just the music produces no feelings I can lay a finger to. I particularly enjoy composers who go back and forth between the two in the same pieces, like Schnittke had done. I also enjoy composers like early Penderecki which if I remember right wrote with no tonal center at all.


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## asu01 (Sep 5, 2017)

Hello. My name is Tyson Platt, and I am an Associate Professor of Psychology at Alabama State University. I am currently investigating how listeners detect and experience emotional content in atonal/experimental music. To that end, I need your help! I am conducting an experiment on the detection of emotional content in atonal music, and I am seeking participants for the experiment. If you are interested in participating in the experiment, please follow this link to learn more about the research and participate in the experiment. The experiment will take approximately 20 minutes to complete. During the experiment, you will be asked to listen to a clip of music and indicate what emotional content you detect in the music. You will not be asked to provide any identifiable information (e.g., name, address, etc.) during the experiment. If you are willing to participate in the experiment, please only complete the experiment once. Thank you for your consideration. https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/7QKQ32Z


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## eugeneonagain (May 14, 2017)

I just did your survey. I don't understand it. I think the 'unknown composer' is a made-up character and the music possibly randomly generated. That's a bit annoying if it is so. I assume the biography is designed to implant ideas during listening - if it wasn't then it's a very suggestive element and creates a bias in the listening experience.


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## fluteman (Dec 7, 2015)

asu01 said:


> Hello. My name is Tyson Platt, and I am an Associate Professor of Psychology at Alabama State University. I am currently investigating how listeners detect and experience emotional content in atonal/experimental music. To that end, I need your help! I am conducting an experiment on the detection of emotional content in atonal music, and I am seeking participants for the experiment. If you are interested in participating in the experiment, please follow this link to learn more about the research and participate in the experiment. The experiment will take approximately 20 minutes to complete. During the experiment, you will be asked to listen to a clip of music and indicate what emotional content you detect in the music. You will not be asked to provide any identifiable information (e.g., name, address, etc.) during the experiment. If you are willing to participate in the experiment, please only complete the experiment once. Thank you for your consideration. https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/7QKQ32Z


That gave me a good laugh. Almost Monty Pythonesque. Or Joyce Hattoesque. Putting three different pulp fiction composer "bios" on the same (close if not identical) musical excerpt. Only one reasonably clever touch, in the last bio: the piece became known as a TV "sound effect" signifying something ominous. John Sibbius? Take a creative writing course.
As for the music, my wild guess would be Stockhausen, since he made frequent use of the bass clarinet in his small ensemble music, and one seems to appear in the sound clip. Kontra-Punkte, maybe? Ed. Actually, I didn't hear a flute, so maybe not.


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## mmsbls (Mar 6, 2011)

eugeneonagain said:


> I just did your survey. I don't understand it. I think the 'unknown composer' is a made-up character and the music possibly randomly generated. That's a bit annoying if it is so. I assume the biography is designed to implant ideas during listening - if it wasn't then it's a very suggestive element and creates a bias in the listening experience.


I'd be shocked if the composer and biography were not made up. How else would you get the exact conditions necessary to test various hypotheses for both the control and experimental groups? Whether the biography was or was not made up, it would implant biases during listening. That's presumably a major part of the experiment. I assume the music was not randomly generated, but I suppose it might have been. That would be interesting to know.


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## fluteman (Dec 7, 2015)

mmsbls said:


> I'd be shocked if the composer and biography were not made up. How else would you get the exact conditions necessary to test various hypotheses for both the control and experimental groups? Whether the biography was or was not made up, it would implant biases during listening. That's presumably a major part of the experiment. I assume the music was not randomly generated, but I suppose it might have been. That would be interesting to know.


I think the right term would be "improvised", not "randomly generated", mmsbls. Those sounded like real instruments. And it wouldn't be very easy to improvise that kind of thing in an ensemble like that, but doable, especially by players who play a lot of Stockhausen. 
Ed.: And the idea behind the experiment seems to be to put different composer names and bios on the same music and see how the reaction differs, but I admit I didn't get all the way through it. That's why I said it was Joyce Hattoesque.


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## Dumbo (Sep 3, 2017)

The shower scene from Psycho. Music by the magnificent Bernard Herrmann. That was pretty damn emotional to me.

Theme song for The Twilight Zone by Marius Constant

Planet of the Apes (original) music by Jerry Goldsmith.

You've grown up with atonal music all around you, manipulating your emotions, but may have never though about it. If you can't hear emotions in composed repertoire works like Pierrot Lunaire, then maybe you can still recollect all the chilling moments of atonal music from your favorite movies and tv shows.

Atonal music as a scene-setter seems to be used mostly for moments of extreme tenzion and violence, or for the eerie and spine-tinginling. It doesn't get used a lot for cuddly Christmassy music. Perhaps that is a flaw, but there's no law that says there's no place for the eerie and violent in music, and no law that says something has to be COMPLETELY, tonal or atonal from beginning to end.

The most thrilling parts in Berg's atonal works, FOR ME, are the moments when he briefly reverts to tonality.


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## fluteman (Dec 7, 2015)

Dumbo said:


> The shower scene from Psycho. Music by the magnificent Bernard Herrmann. That was pretty damn emotional to me.
> 
> Theme song for The Twilight Zone by Marius Constant
> 
> ...


Yes, that's why I said the "ominous sound effect" part was the most clever thing in the bios.


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## mmsbls (Mar 6, 2011)

fluteman said:


> I think the right term would be "improvised", not "randomly generated", mmsbls.


I don't know what the right term would be, but I was responding to eugeneonagain's use of the term.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

mmsbls said:


> I'd be shocked if the composer and biography were not made up. How else would you get the exact conditions necessary to test various hypotheses for both the control and experimental groups? Whether the biography was or was not made up, it would implant biases during listening. That's presumably a major part of the experiment. I assume the music was not randomly generated, but I suppose it might have been. That would be interesting to know.


This researcher posted this same survey last year. At that time several of us dissected it and told him why the experimental design, if it was meant to be taken at face value, was asinine. The only conclusion I could draw was that what was actually being tested was the influence of the bogus biographies on the perception of emotion in modern music. I recommend someone with search skills call up the original thread instead of rehashing the same issues.


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## fluteman (Dec 7, 2015)

mmsbls said:


> I don't know what the right term would be, but I was responding to eugeneonagain's use of the term.


I meant that the clip sounded like real musicians playing real instruments, not anything computer generated. But with today's sophisticated programs, I could be wrong.


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## eugeneonagain (May 14, 2017)

mmsbls said:


> I'd be shocked if the composer and biography were not made up. How else would you get the exact conditions necessary to test various hypotheses for both the control and experimental groups? *Whether the biography was or was not made up, it would implant biases during listening. That's presumably a major part of the experiment.* I assume the music was not randomly generated, but I suppose it might have been. That would be interesting to know.


Well then it has failed because that's not how experiments like this are meant to be conducted. You don;t ask someone to listen to a piece of music to gauge their thoughts (purely from the music) and then say, just before they tune in: "Oh, and the guy was a general failure and lost the love of his life'.

Especially as this is testing responses to "atonal" music. If the biographical suggestion were to suggest that he was the happiest composer who ever lived etc, it would make more sense as an attempt to test people's suggestibility...though not much more.

Bunkum. From start to finish.


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## eugeneonagain (May 14, 2017)

EdwardBast said:


> I recommend someone with search skills call up the original thread instead of rehashing the same issues.


No, I suggest they don't. It's unnatural to keep referring people back to old discussions. People discuss the same ideas/topics all the time in real life and these often take different directions each time.

Just because something has been discussed once does not mean it can't be discussed again. That is what forums are for. If they are not then everyone might as well pack it in and just read archived threads.


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## mmsbls (Mar 6, 2011)

EdwardBast said:


> This researcher posted this same survey last year. At that time several of us dissected it and told him why the experimental design, if it was meant to be taken at face value, was asinine. The only conclusion I could draw was that what was actually being tested was the influence of the bogus biographies on the perception of emotion in modern music. I recommend someone with search skills call up the original thread instead of rehashing the same issues.


Of course the effect of the biographies on perception was a major component of the experiment. If not, the biographies would not have been given. I'm somewhat curious about the music chosen, but it's possible that anything modern sounding would work. I guess it depends on the exact nature of the hypotheses being tested.


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## Dumbo (Sep 3, 2017)

Since we're well into the 21st century now, it seems fair to judge success or failure of music in the 20th century without it being a case of "to early to say."

It doesn't look, overall, like a very good century for classical music. Lots of great stuff by great composers, but oh, how much junk.

I think maybe it has something to do with concert music gradually being divorced first from the middle class and becoming more academic. So many of the great German composers ditched German and the concert hall so they could escape Hitler, and found success composing for Hollywood. Less academic, more commercial, less room for artistic freedom, but they still managed to enthrall audiences, although they never got top billing

I love film music. If I talk to people about Die Tote Stadt, unless they had an upbringing with classical music, odds are they don't know what I'm talking about. But put Robin Hood or the Sea Hawk on TV and tell them to pay attention to the music, they can usually hear something special is going on. I wasn't raised with classical music, but I was subliminally prepped for it as a child by Hollywood geniuses like Korngold and Herrmann.


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## Lisztian (Oct 10, 2011)

Dumbo said:


> Since we're well into the 21st century now, it seems fair to judge success or failure of music in the 20th century without it being a case of "to early to say."
> 
> It doesn't look, overall, like a very good century for classical music. Lots of great stuff by great composers, but oh, how much junk.


I just will never understand what the point is of saying things like this. Why do you need to judge whether the century is a 'success' or a 'failure,' and then tell us about the result you came up with? When a lot of us love this music? No one is forcing anyone to listen to it, and even if the music is somehow 'less universal' that doesn't mean it is worse. Many of us are extremely grateful that not only do we have music from before the 20th century, we also have the musics since then, with different aesthetics and different aims. There's simply more for people to explore and discover than there used to be. Listen, make up your mind (keeping an open one), but don't call a century of music a failure just because you tend to like earlier eras more. I'm sick of hearing it.


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## Nereffid (Feb 6, 2013)

Dumbo said:


> I think maybe it has something to do with concert music gradually being divorced first from the middle class


The divorce was by mutual consent, and I'm pretty sure the initial cause was that the middle class started seeing other people (ie, dead composers!).


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## Botschaft (Aug 4, 2017)

Nereffid said:


> The divorce was by mutual consent, and I'm pretty sure the initial cause was that the middle class started seeing other people (ie, dead composers!).


I think you've got it backwards. As the music of high culture became less compatible with the sane human mind people turned to Afro-American and older styles of music. Mozart and Beethoven were celebrated ever since their deaths.


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## fluteman (Dec 7, 2015)

Lisztian said:


> I just will never understand what the point is of saying things like this. Why do you need to judge whether the century is a 'success' or a 'failure,' and then tell us about the result you came up with? When a lot of us love this music? No one is forcing anyone to listen to it, and even if the music is somehow 'less universal' that doesn't mean it is worse. Many of us are extremely grateful that not only do we have music from before the 20th century, we also have the musics since then, with different aesthetics and different aims. There's simply more for people to explore and discover than there used to be. Listen, make up your mind (keeping an open one), but don't call a century of music a failure just because you tend to like earlier eras more. I'm sick of hearing it.


Agree wholeheartedly. While everyone is entitled to express their opinion, I suggest (once again!) that separate, permanent threads be established for the following topics: (1) How Arnold Schoenberg ruined classical music; (2) Why the 20th century was a failure for music; (3) Why can't composers write music like Mozart? and (4) 4'33" jokes.


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## Nereffid (Feb 6, 2013)

Improbus said:


> I think you've got it backwards. As the music of high culture became less compatible with the sane human mind people turned to Afro-American and older styles of music. Mozart and Beethoven were celebrated ever since their deaths.


Yes: Mozart and Beethoven were celebrated, rather than gradually forgotten. Bach was revived. This was a 19th-century phenomenon.

By the way, people who like modern music are sane.


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## Nereffid (Feb 6, 2013)

fluteman said:


> Agree wholeheartedly. While everyone is entitled to express their opinion, I suggest (once again!) that separate, permanent threads be established for the following topics: (1) How Arnold Schoenberg ruined classical music; (2) Why the 20th century was a failure for music; (3) Why can't composers write music like Mozart? and (4) 4'33" jokes.


And also, for goodness' sake, can't _someone_ who only likes 18th/19th century music please channel their contempt for other music towards medieval and Renaissance music for a change?


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## isorhythm (Jan 2, 2015)

Nereffid said:


> And also, for goodness' sake, can't _someone_ who only likes 18th/19th century music please channel their contempt for other music towards medieval and Renaissance music for a change?


They see it as a precursor or primitive version of the music they like, I think.


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## mmsbls (Mar 6, 2011)

Nereffid said:


> And also, for goodness' sake, can't _someone_ who only likes 18th/19th century music please channel their contempt for other music towards medieval and Renaissance music for a change?


Much more interesting would be critiques of space music.

"Geez Saturn, even a stupid piece of rock could make those sounds. Talk about Pastiche. That is so 1,000,000,000 BC."

"The electromagnetic garbage here is trivial and repetitive. Mozart wrote better harmonies at 12. And Miranda, you dork, where's the melody?


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## Botschaft (Aug 4, 2017)

Nereffid said:


> And also, for goodness' sake, can't _someone_ who only likes 18th/19th century music please channel their contempt for other music towards medieval and Renaissance music for a change?


Those eras had the excuse of inexperience, and at least they didn't devolve, let alone devolve deliberately.


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## Nereffid (Feb 6, 2013)

Improbus said:


> Those eras had the excuse of inexperience


It all fits into such a neat little package, doesn't it?
Inexperienced composers gradually get better until eventually after centuries of toil they finally start creating the correct music, they go on creating a wide variety of music that's all correct, and then they somehow lose the plot, drift away from sanity and devolve back into the swamp.

Maybe birds are just degenerate dinosaurs.


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## isorhythm (Jan 2, 2015)

Improbus said:


> Those eras had the excuse of inexperience, and at least they didn't devolve, let alone devolve deliberately.


This illustrates my above comment perfectly.

No "excuse" is needed. Josquin wasn't on the way to becoming Bach. Nor Machaut on the way to becoming Josquin. This is such a basic misunderstanding.


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## fluteman (Dec 7, 2015)

mmsbls said:


> Much more interesting would be critiques of space music.
> 
> "Geez Saturn, even a stupid piece of rock could make those sounds. Talk about Pastiche. That is so 1,000,000,000 BC."
> 
> "The electromagnetic garbage here is trivial and repetitive. Mozart wrote better harmonies at 12. And Miranda, you dork, where's the melody?


Another 'Planets'? How unoriginal.


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## Botschaft (Aug 4, 2017)

Nereffid said:


> It all fits into such a neat little package, doesn't it?
> Inexperienced composers gradually get better until eventually after centuries of toil they finally start creating the correct music, they go on creating a wide variety of music that's all correct, and then they somehow lose the plot, drift away from sanity and devolve back into the swamp.
> 
> Maybe birds are just degenerate dinosaurs.


Sounds about right: it was all just leading to Brahms all along, every note ever written, where all the roads met.


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## Nereffid (Feb 6, 2013)

And let's spare a thought for every other culture on the planet, which has _never_ composed the right music...


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## eugeneonagain (May 14, 2017)

Improbus said:


> Sounds about right: it was all just leading to Brahms all along, every note ever written, where all the roads met.


And stagnated until change occurred. Brahms is not the apogee of music. Never was, never will be.


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## Botschaft (Aug 4, 2017)

Nereffid said:


> And let's spare a thought for every other culture on the planet, which has _never_ composed the right music...


Woe to them, indeed!



eugeneonagain said:


> And stagnated until change occurred. Brahms is not the apogee of music. Never was, never will be.


Then I guess it must have been Beethoven.


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## isorhythm (Jan 2, 2015)

Nereffid said:


> And let's spare a thought for every other culture on the planet, which has _never_ composed the right music...


Sad, as one of the West's greatest men would say.


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## eugeneonagain (May 14, 2017)

Improbus said:


> Then I guess it must have been Beethoven.


If you go about looking for sole representatives of quality in everything and narrowing things down, you'll end up missing out on the breadth of a lot of good things.


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## Razumovskymas (Sep 20, 2016)

Atonal music is not rooted in our history as tonal music is. The development and evolution of tonal music happened alongside the development of human kind (and more importantly) human language. So tonal music tunes in with human emotion effortlessly because of that. 

Atonal music is rooted in an "idea" or an artistic statement and therefore is less likely to evoke human emotion as easy as tonal music.


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## eugeneonagain (May 14, 2017)

Razumovskymas said:


> Atonal music is not rooted in our history as tonal music is. The development and evolution of tonal music happened alongside the development of human kind (and more importantly) human language. So tonal music tunes in with human emotion effortlessly because of that.


Western 'tonal' music was all over the place until equal temperament and common practice in music. That time period is considerably shorter than the development of humankind and human language, so there is no argument to be made in this direction, it's a cul-de-sac. The use of musical structures to attempt to convey human emotions has perhaps a longer history, but it is not a constant one within art music.



Razumovskymas said:


> Atonal music is rooted in an "idea" or an artistic statement and therefore is less likely to evoke human emotion as easy as tonal music.


All of music is rooted in an idea. Western art-music is not an extension of birdsong. The main elements relating to emotion vary: major/minor modes/keys; certain intervals and melodic progressions. The other elements are timbre and the particular sound of instruments (the voice, the lute etc). There has been quite a bit of time for suggested associations to form and take root. There is no great external master-plan behind this.


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## Razumovskymas (Sep 20, 2016)

eugeneonagain said:


> Western 'tonal' music was all over the place until equal temperament and common practice in music. That time period is considerably shorter than the development of humankind and human language, so there is no argument to be made in this direction, it's a cul-de-sac. The use of musical structures to attempt to convey human emotions has perhaps a longer history, but it is not a constant one within art music.


I'm not talking about "western" tonal music. I'm talking about the first tribes probably using intervals and repetitions that are still used in western tonal music and that being the starting point of that long development / evolution.



eugeneonagain said:


> All of music is rooted in an idea. Western art-music is not an extension of birdsong. The main elements relating to emotion vary: major/minor modes/keys; certain intervals and melodic progressions. The other elements are timbre and the particular sound of instruments (the voice, the lute etc). There has been quite a bit of time for suggested associations to form and take root. There is no great external master-plan behind this.


Yeah ok western art music is not an extension of birdsong and tonal music can also be "meta" and conceptual and consequence of an idea. But still it is my conviction that there is an important difference between tonal and atonal, tonal being an evolution and atonal being the idea of wanting to break free from that evolution. That's what I was trying to say in a few words.


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## eugeneonagain (May 14, 2017)

Razumovskymas said:


> I'm not talking about "western" tonal music. I'm talking about the first tribes probably using intervals and repetitions that are still used in western tonal music and that being the starting point of that long development / evolution.


'Probably' using intervals? No-one knows anything about what the _earliest tribes_ did. We don't even know about the music of the Romans. In any case this is not the same as the formal adoption of equal temperament and the development of music from there.



Razumovskymas said:


> Yeah ok western art music is not an extension of birdsong and tonal music can also be "meta" and conceptual and consequence of an idea. But still it is my conviction that there is an important difference between tonal and atonal, tonal being an evolution and atonal being the idea of wanting to break free from that evolution. That's what I was trying to say in a few words.


Well you can be personally convinced of it, but that's not enough. The large majority of 'atonal' music (and again what are we including and referring to here?) uses the same materials that were set in place with equal temperament. There was no desire to break free from any evolution, but to build on it and find new routes.


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## Razumovskymas (Sep 20, 2016)

eugeneonagain said:


> 'Probably' using intervals? No-one knows anything about what the _earliest tribes_ did. We don't even know about the music of the Romans. In any case this is not the same as the formal adoption of equal temperament and the development of music from there.
> 
> Well you can be personally convinced of it, but that's not enough. The large majority of 'atonal' music (and again what are we including and referring to here?) uses the same materials that were set in place with equal temperament. There was no desire to break free from any evolution, but to build on it and find new routes.


Ok then, what's your explanation of a possible difference in emotional perception between tonal and atonal music?


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## eugeneonagain (May 14, 2017)

Razumovskymas said:


> Ok then, what's your explanation of a possible difference in emotional perception between tonal and atonal music?


Only suggestions, not an explanation: Shorter time period as against the longer period of common practice. Thus unfamiliarity.

Remember though, I am not in the business of claiming 'tonal' music doesn't have great scope for suggesting emotional states. My argument concerns the false idea that tonally ambivalent/tonally extended/atonal...etc music is incapable of suggesting emotional states.


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## Razumovskymas (Sep 20, 2016)

eugeneonagain said:


> Only suggestions, not an explanation: Shorter time period as against the longer period of common practice. *Thus unfamiliarity*.


I totally agree with that. That's what I mean with "rooted in history" as in "familiar to a lot of people for a much more longer period in time"



eugeneonagain said:


> Remember though, I am not in the business of claiming 'tonal' music doesn't have great scope for suggesting emotional states. My argument concerns *the false idea that tonally ambivalent/tonally extended/atonal...etc music is incapable of suggesting emotional states*.


I'm not saying that atonal music is incapable of suggesting emotional states. I'm saying and trying to give an explanation why it's less obvious with atonal music. I'm convinced that if we expose human kind exclusively to atonal music for 1000 years, it will become as "historically rooted" and familiar to all of us. But that probably will never happen. Tonal music will always be the "easy" music and atonal the "difficult" music. Although you never know, if popular culture picks up atonal music, we'll see what happens! :lol:


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## eugeneonagain (May 14, 2017)

The problem is the kind of music you are referring to has not been in evidence for 1000 years. Not even close.


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## Razumovskymas (Sep 20, 2016)

eugeneonagain said:


> The problem is the kind of music you are referring to has not been in evidence for 1000 years. Not even close.


Are you denying that Western tonal music has roots in gregorian chant?


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## eugeneonagain (May 14, 2017)

Razumovskymas said:


> Are you denying that Western tonal music has roots in gregorian chant?


Yes, because it doesn't. There are obviously some elements shared, but the entire system of music in gregorian chant is not that of Bach's period or later.

To be clear, any period you decide to choose before the establishment of equal temperament and common practice, which is representative of the music people want to call 'tonal' is not a 100% direct and natural predecessor.


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## Razumovskymas (Sep 20, 2016)

eugeneonagain said:


> Yes, because it doesn't. There are obviously some elements shared, but the entire system of music in gregorian chant is not that of Bach's period or later.
> 
> To be clear, any period you decide to choose before the establishment of equal temperament and common practice, which is representative of the music people want to call 'tonal' is not a 100% direct and natural predecessor.


Ok, so you are literally saying Western tonal music has no roots in gregorian chant. Now you lost me completely I'm afraid.

I strongly disagree on this one. I hear more resemblance between an early gregorian chant and a late romantic work then between a late romantic work and an early serial work.

Of course if you don't consider gregorian chant being western tonal music then our frame of reference is so different that there is no point in us 2 discussing any further.


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## eugeneonagain (May 14, 2017)

Razumovskymas said:


> Ok, so you are literally saying Western tonal music has no roots in gregorian chant. Now you lost me completely I'm afraid.


Yes, I am using written words, so it is literal. However, I never stated that it has 'no roots' in early church music/gregorian chant.



Razumovskymas said:


> I strongly disagree on this one. I hear more resemblance between an early gregorian chant and a late romantic work then between a late romantic work and an early serial work.


Perhaps because late romanticism became both very chromatic and some of it went digging into old church music for inspiration. By the late 19th century the context had widened considerably.



Razumovskymas said:


> Of course if you don't consider gregorian chant being western tonal music then our frame of reference is so different that there is no point in us 2 discussing any further.


A convenient exit for you then.


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## Razumovskymas (Sep 20, 2016)

eugeneonagain said:


> Yes, I am using written words, so it is literal. However, I never stated that it has 'no roots' in early church music/gregorian chant.


So in one post you say Western tonal music has no roots in Gregorian chant and in the other post you say it does? I don't quite follow.



eugeneonagain said:


> Perhaps because late romanticism became both very chromatic and some of it went digging into old church music for inspiration. By the late 19th century the context had widened considerably.


No not because of that reason. Because I find all music up until late romanticism having more resemblance with gregorian chant then with any serial work. I was taking late romanticism as an example to illustrate the dramatic change in a very short period of time serialism was. Up until serialism every evolution in music has strong roots in earlier music, that's just how music has evolved. I see serialism as a dramatic change. Don't you?



eugeneonagain said:


> A convenient exit for you then.


No way man!! I'm staying! :tiphat:


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## eugeneonagain (May 14, 2017)

Razumovskymas said:


> So in one post you say Western tonal music has no roots in Gregorian chant and in the other post you say it does? I don't quite follow.


This is true and I should explain. I did already state that even though the basic musical elements are shared, music as it developed after Bach (and in his time) is not directly comparable to early church music. The same basic musical elements are there in Schoenberg too, so if you want to go the lineage route...



Razumovskymas said:


> No not because of that reason. Because I find all music up until late romanticism having more resemblance with gregorian chant then with any serial work. I was taking late romanticism as an example to illustrate the dramatic change in a very short period of time serialism was. Up until serialism every evolution in music has strong roots in earlier music, that's just how music has evolved. I see serialism as a dramatic change. Don't you?


I don't think you can seriously argue that galant and classical period music resembles gregorian chant. I see serialism as a dramatic way of organising the same musical base. It's a change, yes, but less dramatic than people who simply don't care for it try to make out.



Razumovskymas said:


> No way man!! I'm staying! :tiphat:


That's up to you squire. In truth though I've already had this boring discussion in about half a dozen other threads. I can't remember if you are one of the anti-modernist music posse, but if you are I don't expect to be converting you or anything.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

I don't think tonal music is more emotionally resonant than atonal music for most people simply because it's more familiar, but because it's a more complete cross-sensory mapping of basic patterns of physical, cognitive, and emotional experience. The polarities and dynamic trajectory of emotion itself, including its physical and cognitive components, are more comprehensively represented by a system of relationships between tones which includes a pole (the "tonic") of absolute consonance, stability, resolution, and rest, a pole from which all melodic and harmonic activity is a departure and to which all such activity wants to return, than by a system which eschews that point of ultimate repose. I base this belief on a particular understanding of how emotion works.

Psychologically, an emotion occurs when a "steady state," a state of being without any particular affect, is disturbed by a stimulus which has a certain value to us, and which prompts us to take action toward a goal. If we can move coherently toward the achievement of our goal and anticipate reaching it, even if the process is prolonged, indirect, and met with obstacles (in fact, particularly if it is prolonged, up to a point) our emotional experience will be strong, and we will feel pleasure, first in anticipating, and then in achieving, the release of tension as our "steady state" is restored. If, however, the nature and value of the stimulus is uncertain, or if we are unsure of our goal and feel unable to achieve it, we will experience not emotion, which is an enlivened state, but anxiety, frustration, dissatisfaction, and depression.

I find the correspondence between this basic pattern of emotional experience and the structural dynamics of tonal music striking - and, given music's well-known power to suggest and arouse emotion, not coincidental. Whether or not a tonic note or chord is ever actually heard in a given piece of music, and regardless of the complexity or ambiguity of the harmonic relationships involved, music in which there is even the suggestion that a tonic pole exists as a potential destination provides the perceptual/cognitive brain with the emotion-arousing promise of the "steady state" which is the emotion's natural, desired end point. By contrast, musical systems which eschew the stable pole of a tonal center, along with a system of relationships to that pole which provides the mind with a directional sense of how a stable state might be restored, are unable to represent fully the trajectory which in biological life is traced by the value-laden, goal-directed experience of emotion.

The word "fully" in that last sentence is important. It would be wrong to deny to atonal music all capacity to represent subjective states, and it certainly doesn't mean that a listener can't feel things while listening to it. Music is evocative on many levels, and the capabilities, experiences, understandings, and values, with their consequent reactions, brought to it by different listeners are infinitely varied. On the level of musical structure, as here described, atonal music may present complex webs of relative tensions and relaxations, and these, combined with other musical qualities, may certainly affect listeners emotionally. There is more to respond to and enjoy in music than tonal structures. But the peculiar nature of tonality, its ability to cross-sensorily map at the most basic level of musical structure the fundamental pattern of emotional experience, should be recognized, and I think it provides the best explanation for the apparent capacity of music to "contain" a great range of emotion, the difficulty listeners have in recognizing emotional meaning in atonal music, and the spontaneous development and ubiquity of tonal systems in the world's musical traditions.


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## Botschaft (Aug 4, 2017)

Very good: now we just need Woodduck to provide us with a model for understanding the visually evocative nature of music.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Improbus said:


> Very good: now we just need Woodduck to provide us with a model for understanding the visually evocative nature of music.


Cross-domain mapping. It's one of the most fertile areas of inquiry in cognitive psychology.

But no more now. The last one nearly killed me.


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## Botschaft (Aug 4, 2017)

All of this makes me wonder whether an advanced alien species could ever understand our music either by simply listening to it or by somehow decoding it, perhaps even better than we could. 

Something to think about.


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

Improbus said:


> All of this makes me wonder whether an advanced alien species could ever understand our music either by simply listening to it or by somehow decoding it, perhaps even better than we could.
> 
> Something to think about.


"Zork, did you listen to that Bach music on the golden disk from the spacecraft we found?"

"Well, Throg, I listened to the first part. Frankly, it was a bit too objective for me, dry even. But that's Gould I guess. I prefer Perahia, even if some find him a bit Romantic. Of course it was on the piano, which is fine... But, really?"


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## Dumbo (Sep 3, 2017)

Is there emotion in the Grand Canyon?


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

Dumbo said:


> Is there emotion in the Grand Canyon?


Falling from an overlook can be a very emotional experience, though for only a brief period of time.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Dumbo said:


> Is there emotion in the Grand Canyon?


Yes, and it's suite.


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## Botschaft (Aug 4, 2017)

KenOC said:


> "Zork, did you listen to that Bach music on the golden disk from the spacecraft we found?"
> 
> "Well, Throg, I listened to the first part. Frankly, it was a bit too objective for me, dry even. But that's Gould I guess. I prefer Perahia, even if some find him a bit Romantic. Of course it was on the piano, which is fine... But, really?"


:lol:

Seriously, though:


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## fluteman (Dec 7, 2015)

Woodduck said:


> Yes, and it's suite.


That pun was ferde birds.


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## Razumovskymas (Sep 20, 2016)

eugeneonagain said:


> )
> That's up to you squire. In truth though I've already had this boring discussion in about half a dozen other threads. I can't remember if you are one of the anti-modernist music posse, but if you are I don't expect to be converting you or anything.


I'm in no posse at all. Although I haven't seen the light YET in atonal music I will keep on trying now and then. But I'm definitely not anti.

And I find discussions about tonal / atonal one of the more interesting music discussions. The question our discussion raises: is atonal music just a "natural" evolution in music or rather a revolutionary idea or concept, I find very interesting.


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## St Matthew (Aug 26, 2017)

Music as it is, is an unnatural thing. It's art, it's a human construct using the phenomenon of sound.


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## mmsbls (Mar 6, 2011)

Razumovskymas said:


> And I find discussions about tonal / atonal one of the more interesting music discussions. The question our discussion raises: is atonal music just a "natural" evolution in music or rather a revolutionary idea or concept, I find very interesting.


I also have found both the evolution and the reception of modern music fascinating. Based on discussion here and elsewhere, I think it's fair to say atonal music was both "natural" in that there was steady progress in that direction and revolutionary in that I believe composers no longer depended remotely as strongly on standard tonal techniques.


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## hpowders (Dec 23, 2013)

St Matthew said:


> Music as it is, is an unnatural thing. It's art, it's a human construct using the phenomenon of sound.


Another brilliant post. No wonder Bach wrote a tribute to you.

Thanks for coming BACH_ down to earth._ It was the_ sincere_ thing to do.

Thanks for helping me find the microgram of emotion contained in the totality of atonal music.

You really did open one of my eyes.


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## St Matthew (Aug 26, 2017)

mmsbls said:


> I also have found both the evolution and the reception of modern music fascinating. Based on discussion here and elsewhere, I think it's fair to say atonal music was both "natural" in that there was steady progress in that direction and revolutionary in that I believe composers no longer depended remotely as strongly on standard tonal techniques.


Tonality = Cubism
Atonality = The morphing of atomic particles


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## St Matthew (Aug 26, 2017)

Razumovskymas said:


> Tonal music is not rooted in our history as atonal music is. The development and evolution of atonal music happened alongside the development of human kind (and more importantly) human language. So atonal music tunes in with human emotion effortlessly because of that.
> 
> Tonal music is rooted in an "idea" or an artistic statement and therefore is less likely to evoke human emotion as easy as atonal music.


Maybe, maybe not. Music is music though, culture is culture. Foreign culture, is foreign culture until you experience it, get to know it, embrace yourself with it, become fluent in it and connect with it.

Is anyone here actually a fan of non-western styles of traditional and classical music? I feel that this site leans as far as possible from this, considering "foreign to YOUR ears" seems to equate to less-relevant, less-legitimate, less-integral or less-genuine by this site's standards, which is not correct, it's entirely based on a bias. You're never expected to like anything but come on


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

fluteman said:


> That pun was ferde birds.


Grovfefe. ...........


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## Botschaft (Aug 4, 2017)

St Matthew said:


> Maybe, maybe not. Music is music though, culture is culture. Foreign culture, is foreign culture until you experience it, get to know it, embrace yourself with it, become fluent in it and connect with it.


This does nothing to change the fact some things are inherently more suited to the human mind and vice versa.



> Is anyone here actually a fan of non-western styles of traditional and classical music? I feel that this site leans as far as possible from this, considering "foreign to YOUR ears" seems to equate to less-relevant, less-legitimate, less-integral or less-genuine by this site's standards, which is not correct, it's entirely based on a bias. You're never expected to like anything but come on


What else is one to expect from a forum dedicated to western classical music? You seem to be missing the point.


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## St Matthew (Aug 26, 2017)

Improbus said:


> This does nothing to change the fact some things are inherently more suited to the human mind and vice versa.


Such as American business culture to Chinese business culture? Or German to French? This does not change the fact that you just made an empty statement



Improbus said:


> What else is one to expect from a forum dedicated to western classical music? You seem to be missing the point.


No, I definitely get the point that classical listeners are more closed-minded than listeners of any other genre, I get that loud and clear


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

St Matthew said:


> Maybe, maybe not. Music is music though, culture is culture. Foreign culture, is foreign culture until you experience it, get to know it, embrace yourself with it, become fluent in it and connect with it.
> 
> Is anyone here actually a fan of non-western styles of traditional and classical music? I feel that this site leans as far as possible from this, considering "foreign to YOUR ears" seems to equate to less-relevant, less-legitimate, less-integral or less-genuine by this site's standards, which is not correct, it's entirely based on a bias. You're never expected to like anything but come on


The post by Razumovskymas to which this is a response reads:

_*Atonal* music is not rooted in our history as *tonal* music is. The development and evolution of* tonal* music happened alongside the development of human kind (and more importantly) human language. So *tonal* music tunes in with human emotion effortlessly because of that.

*Atonal* music is rooted in an "idea" or an artistic statement and therefore is less likely to evoke human emotion as easy as *tonal* music.
_
When you quote it, however, you change it to:

_*Tonal* music is not rooted in our history as *atonal* music is. The development and evolution of *atonal* music happened alongside the development of human kind (and more importantly) human language. So *atonal* music tunes in with human emotion effortlessly because of that.

*Tonal* music is rooted in an "idea" or an artistic statement and therefore is less likely to evoke human emotion as easy as *atonal* music.
_
I think it would be at least helpful to note that you made this change, reversing Razumovskymas's meaning, and to explain why you made it. With his actual statement restored to view, it might be more comprehensibly addressed. The response you do offer, seemingly reducing the whole question to one of familiarity, sidesteps his point, and makes one which I think is wrong.

Since you ask, I will say yes, I do enjoy music of non-Western traditions, particularly North Indian classical music, which as a young person I found impressive almost immediately, even though its sounds and principles were unfamiliar, and even though I would never claim that I could respond to it precisely as a person would to whom that culture is native. I suspect that there are more than a few other people on the forum who also enjoy non-Western styles of music, and I see no reason to suppose that there is any "standard" operative here which dictates that "foreign to my ears" equates to "less-relevant, less-legitimate, less-integral, or less-genuine."

I would like to point out that Indian classical music is quite tonal, in the broad sense of exhibiting a tonal center, along with a hierarchy of importance and conventional relationships among the notes of the scales it utilizes. Nearly all indigenous musical traditions are tonal in this fundamental sense, our system of tonal harmony being a subspecies of tonal music. This fact may serve to bring us back around to Razumovskymas's actual observations and to a consideration of their merit.


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## Botschaft (Aug 4, 2017)

St Matthew said:


> Such as American business culture to Chinese business culture? Or German to French?


No.



> This does not change the fact that you just made an empty statement


That, quite unlike what I said, is not a fact.



> No, I definitely get the point that classical listeners are more closed-minded than listeners of any other genre,


Classical music isn't a genre, just like that isn't the point. The point of this forum is western classical music.



> I get that loud and clear


You get nothing.


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## St Matthew (Aug 26, 2017)

What are you arguing about? that your subjective tastes are more important than someone else's?


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## St Matthew (Aug 26, 2017)

Let me guess, invalid point? Tonality is just blindly accepted as the default truth? this is sounding suddenly very much like religion now


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## St Matthew (Aug 26, 2017)

Woodduck said:


> The post by Razumovskymas to which this is a response reads:
> 
> _*Atonal* music is not rooted in our history as *tonal* music is. The development and evolution of* tonal* music happened alongside the development of human kind (and more importantly) human language. So *tonal* music tunes in with human emotion effortlessly because of that.
> 
> ...


The point in reversing his statement, is to show how interchangeable his statement is


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## St Matthew (Aug 26, 2017)

Improbus said:


> No.


Yes



Improbus said:


> That, quite unlike what I said, is not a fact.


But unlike what you said to what I said, what you said wasn't a fact because I said what you said what I said?


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## St Matthew (Aug 26, 2017)

Improbus said:


> Classical music isn't a genre, just like that isn't the point. The point of this forum is western classical music.


Which is written in the name of the forum


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## EddieRUKiddingVarese (Jan 8, 2013)

I'm all for Bi-tonal anyway, I've moved beyond the "a" and the basic " " tonal, its so 4'33" anyway....


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## St Matthew (Aug 26, 2017)

I'm going to do this again:



> I do not wish this to become a slam against music, or music, because I will just as happily listen to either music, or music. I have often found that it's hard to find an emotion in music. I was wondering if you perhaps found the emotions I've been seeking lately in that type of music? Is there emotion to be found there?


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## isorhythm (Jan 2, 2015)

St Matthew said:


> The point in reversing his statement, is to show how interchangeable his statement is


The problem is it's not interchangeable at all.

I love tons of atonal music but I also like talking about music and understanding how it works. These two things don't have to be at odds, and I don't understand why you want them to be.


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## mmsbls (Mar 6, 2011)

St Matthew said:


> No, I definitely get the point that classical listeners are more closed-minded than listeners of any other genre, I get that loud and clear


I really don't know how close-minded listeners of various musical types are, but I have always thought that classical listeners are fairly open-minded. Many people here listen to music from the Renaissance through the Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and early Modern. They listen to motets, large masses, opera, chamber music, large ensembles, historical as well as modern instruments. The variation in music in those eras and genres is enormous. I don't know too many non-classical listeners whose tastes seem to vary as much.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

St Matthew said:


> The point in reversing his statement, is to show how interchangeable his statement is


It doesn't show that. It only blurs the issue, and allows you to pretend you've addressed it.


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## mmsbls (Mar 6, 2011)

I would like to echo St Matthew's comment reiterating the OP's request. If I were asking about emotions in atonal music, I would listen to those who enjoy the music rather than those who do not. It's not that the opinions and experiences of those who do not enjoy atonal music are less important (and certainly this thread has asked for people's experiences), but rather those who do enjoy the music are more likely to experience a range of emotions (especially positive). 

I'm assuming the intent was to discern what emotions people could hear in atonal music rather than to essentially poll the forum.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

mmsbls said:


> I really don't know how close-minded listeners of various musical types are, but I have always thought that classical listeners are fairly open-minded. Many people here listen to music from the Renaissance through the Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and early Modern. They listen to motets, large masses, opera, chamber music, large ensembles, historical as well as modern instruments. The variation in music in those eras and genres is enormous. I don't know too many non-classical listeners whose tastes seem to vary as much.


My classical-loving friends and acquaintances tend to have broad tastes, both for "classical" music across the centuries and for nonclassical and non-Western genres.


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## Razumovskymas (Sep 20, 2016)

mmsbls said:


> I also have found both the evolution and the reception of modern music fascinating. Based on discussion here and elsewhere, I think it's fair to say atonal music was both "natural" in that *there was steady progress* in that direction and revolutionary in that I believe composers no longer depended remotely as strongly on standard tonal techniques.


Indeed, in that way one could say the growing "desire" for atonality climaxing at the end of late romanticism is a "natural" musical evolution.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Razumovskymas said:


> Indeed, in that way one could say the growing "desire" for atonality climaxing at the end of late romanticism is a "natural" musical evolution.


What Romantic music shows a desire, or even a "desire," for atonality? What composers before Schoenberg were driven by such a "desire"?


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

Woodduck said:


> What Romantic music shows a desire, or even a "desire," for atonality? What composers before Schoenberg were driven by such a "desire"?


Certainly there were experiments. Liszt, for one, in his "Bagatelle without Tonality." Interesting, but he probably considered it a mere...well...bagatelle.


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## Phil loves classical (Feb 8, 2017)

I think there may be a multipliciy of meanings with the word "atonal". Post Romanticism was pointing to tonal freedom, which does not necessarily equate with certain forms of atonality. Music does not need a tonal centre to make use of tonal relationships. Bartok's music is clearly tone oriented but may lack a tonal centre in certain pieces. There had since been a break since, where some music intentionally suppresses any relationships between tones in music, like Ferneyhough and others. It's like a total colour-blind artist trying to produce emotions. The emotions become more ambiguous. You can listen to the rhythms to get a sense of emotion. For example slower tempos with a line of melody will give a sense of melancholy or pain, etc (like the Berg Violin Concerto again) while fast and furious lower pitched pointed rhythms portray anger, etc. while higher pitches and fast may sound more playful.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

KenOC said:


> Certainly there were experiments. Liszt, for one, in his "Bagatelle without Tonality." Interesting, but he probably considered it a mere...well...bagatelle.


The usual suspect. Here it is:






A wonderful little flight of harmonic fancy that refuses to alight in a defined tonal area. Its harmony is still triadic and tonally suggestive. This kind of "atonal" chromaticism, utilizing a lot of diminished triads and enharmonic changes, had been in use for decades before 1885, and in fact goes back through Bach to the Italian madrigalists, but Liszt's innovation lies in keeping the tonality ambiguous throughout most of the piece and ending without resolution.

An important thing to note is that this sort of harmony almost always had programmatic implications; Liszt's and Wagner's (and for that matter Marenzio's) most tonally ambiguous effects express some dramatic, poetic, or pictorial idea. In this case Liszt calls his bagatelle "Fourth Mephisto Waltz" to express one of his favorite moods, the diabolical.

I can think of no examples in Romantic music of sustained tonal ambiguity being used as a basic idiom for a lengthy piece of absolute music where no extramusical idea or program calls for it, and where some more or less clear tonal structuring would not be employed to provide coherence. Wagner himself made the suggestive remark that composers might be unwise to try to adopt in absolute music some of the effects which for him were dramatically motivated, saying that "in the symphony one thinks very differently."

What Liszt does here is obviously not atonality as Schoenberg meant and practiced it. To say that music like this indicates music's growing "desire" for such, seems to me a bit of retrospective mind-reading. Liszt might have said, on hearing Schoenberg's Piano Suite, "yes, that's where Wagner and I were heading" - or he might have asked, "what is music like this supposed to represent, young man?"


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## Chronochromie (May 17, 2014)

KenOC said:


> Certainly there were experiments. Liszt, for one, in his "Bagatelle without Tonality." Interesting, but he probably considered it a mere...well...bagatelle.


Or rather, a Mephisto Waltz...


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## DaveM (Jun 29, 2015)

Razumovskymas said:


> Indeed, in that way one could say the growing "desire" for atonality climaxing at the end of late romanticism is a "natural" musical evolution.


Forgetting for the moment what composers might or might not 'desired', I have never seen any evidence that any listeners were saying, 'Ya know, I'm getting awfully tired of this tonal Romantic stuff. I have this real desire for something radically new that expresses my emotions.'

Seems to me that as far as a new way of expressing the emotions of the listener or audience is concerned, atonal music was an answer to a question no one asked to solve a problem no one had.


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## mmsbls (Mar 6, 2011)

DaveM said:


> Forgetting for the moment what composers might or might not 'desired', I have never seen any evidence that any listeners were saying, 'Ya know, I'm getting awfully tired of this tonal Romantic stuff. I have this real desire for something radically new that expresses my emotions.'
> 
> Seems to me that as far as a new way of expressing the emotions of the listener or audience is concerned, atonal music was an answer to a question no one asked to solve a problem no one had.


I have never heard that listeners wanted Renaissance, Baroque, or Classical music to change. I think music evolves because the _composers_ push the envelope not because listeners do. Composers clearly wanted change since Romantic music was becoming ever more chromatic, and eventually many composers embraced the new modern styles.


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## EddieRUKiddingVarese (Jan 8, 2013)




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## Phil loves classical (Feb 8, 2017)

Check out this flute solo. Lots of emotion here, tonal centre a bit ambiguous.


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## DaveM (Jun 29, 2015)

mmsbls said:


> I have never heard that listeners wanted Renaissance, Baroque, or Classical music to change. I think music evolves because the _composers_ push the envelope not because listeners do. Composers clearly wanted change since Romantic music was becoming ever more chromatic, and eventually many composers embraced the new modern styles.


I know what you're saying, but I can't help but feel that while the composers of the pre-early 20th century had to, more than not, please publishers, benefactors and audiences, the composers that followed tended to go their own merry way without much interest in pleasing anybody but themselves. I've never read or heard anything that Schoenberg said along the line of 'I think the people are really going to like this atonal direction I'm going.'


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## Dumbo (Sep 3, 2017)

I'm not sure I can agree with this:



> This does nothing to change the fact some things are inherently more suited to the human mind and vice versa


Maybe for babies but not for adults. I recall in one of Desmond Morris's books, he mentioned how very young infants responded well to face caricatures with two dots for eyes. As they got a little older, they reponded more to "have a nice day" faces with the two dots and a smile. But as they got older, they became more intrigued with faces where noses and ears and eyes and lips were in the wrong places or in the wrong number.

Which makes sense, if you think about it. Even babies are art critics. I guess they become more contemporary in their tastes, more baby-cubist, as they learn to craw!.

So, what music is inherently more suited to the human mind? I think that's less a matter of biology than of personal taste evolution, what they are exposed to, and cultural tastes.


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## ArtMusic (Jan 5, 2013)

Manok said:


> I do not wish this to become a slam against atonal, or non tonal music, because I will just as happily listen to either tonal, or non tonal variants. I have often found that it's hard to find an emotion in non tonal music. I was wondering if you perhaps found the emotions I've been seeking lately in that type of music? Is there emotion to be found there?


Emotion in the traditional sense is not there, it is a different soundscape. It is about enjoying the sounds, not the emotions.


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## mmsbls (Mar 6, 2011)

DaveM said:


> I know what you're saying, but I can't help but feel that while the composers of the pre-early 20th century had to, more than not, please publishers, benefactors and audiences, the composers that followed tended to go their own merry way without much interest in pleasing anybody but themselves. I've never read or heard anything that Schoenberg said along the line of 'I think the people are really going to like this atonal direction I'm going.'


I believe Monteverdi, Beethoven, Wagner, and Schoenberg probably all thought their new music was pretty good stuff and none of them made changes based on whether the public would like the new direction. It turned out that Monteverdi, Beethoven, and Wagner wrote music that the public generally did appreciate within a modest time period. Schoenberg received much less appreciation for reasons that I think we don't fully understand. I believe Schoenberg's view of his music was not substantially different from the view of the other three.

What fascinates me is not why Schoenberg and others wrote what they wrote but why so many of us had or have so much difficulty enjoying it.


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## jegreenwood (Dec 25, 2015)

As I read the last several posts in this thread, I happened to be listening to Berg's Chamber Concerto. The ever varying rhythms, tempos and instrumentation (resembling a dialog), the fortes and fortissimos followed by a plaintive sole violin can move me on the right day. For many years it didn't. I had to get used to it - still getting getting used to it.


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## DaveM (Jun 29, 2015)

mmsbls said:


> I believe Monteverdi, Beethoven, Wagner, and Schoenberg probably all thought their new music was pretty good stuff and none of them made changes based on whether the public would like the new direction. It turned out that Monteverdi, Beethoven, and Wagner wrote music that the public generally did appreciate within a modest time period. Schoenberg received much less appreciation for reasons that I think we don't fully understand. I believe Schoenberg's view of his music was not substantially different from the view of the other three.
> 
> What fascinates me is not why Schoenberg and others wrote what they wrote but why so many of us had or have so much difficulty enjoying it.


I guess my interest is more why they wrote what they wrote. In the case of Schoenberg particularly, I believe his interest was in doing something completely new that satisfied his own creative drive.

Beethoven knew that the Eroica and the 9th Symphony were very original for the times (the Eroica considered as one of the transitional works from Classical to Romantic), but he wanted them to be accepted and I think he knew that they would be eventually. In keeping with the OP, even these new works were laden with melodic emotional expression.

But when Schoenberg transitioned to atonal, he was turning things upside down. He had to know that general acceptance was going to be questionable and he apparently said as much. You have often mentioned the effort taken to enjoy this music and you're someone who particularly loves classical and is willing to make the effort. What about the listeners who are fair weather or potential classical listeners? Again in keeping with the OP, IMO atonal music is not likely to touch the heartstrings of the less sophisticated listener or in a lot of cases, the sophisticated listener. The work required to understand and appreciate atonal music is IMO a major problem in the classical music grand scheme of things.

Interesting experiment: if an avid classical music listener has a non-classical listener girlfriend or boyfriend and is having him/her over for a candlelit dinner, what will be the emotional feelings raised by a Romantic era Adagio vs a Schoenberg atonal adagio playing in the background?


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## mmsbls (Mar 6, 2011)

DaveM said:


> I guess my interest is more why they wrote what they wrote. In the case of Schoenberg particularly, I believe his interest was in doing something completely new that satisfied his own creative drive.
> 
> Beethoven knew that the Eroica and the 9th Symphony were very original for the times (the Eroica considered as one of the transitional works from Classical to Romantic), but he wanted them to be accepted and I think he knew that they would be eventually. In keeping with the OP, even these new works were laden with melodic emotional expression.
> 
> But when Schoenberg transitioned to atonal, he was turning things upside down. He had to know that general acceptance was going to be questionable and he apparently said as much.


I'm not sure Schoenberg's and Beethoven's view of their music was so different. You may be correct, but I always thought Schoenberg was very disappointed that people did not appreciate his music and was somewhat surprised. Schoenberg said, ""There is nothing I wish for more earnestly [than] that my melodies should be known and whistled." (Fred Flaxman, 1997)



DaveM said:


> The work required to understand and appreciate atonal music is IMO a major problem in the classical music grand scheme of things.


I don't disagree that the work necessary to appreciate modern music may be problematic for the classical music community.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Dumbo said:


> I'm not sure I can agree with this:
> 
> "This does nothing to change the fact some things are inherently more suited to the human mind and vice versa." (posted by Improbus)
> 
> ...


Interesting observation about babies, and your imagery ( babies as art critics) gave me a chuckle. It seems to me you make a good point that could be expanded upon. But Improbus's point might be good too, differently stated.

A cubist portrait with misplaced facial features may very well fascinate a child old enough to see it as something other than frightening or random, but past a certain age we know that it's a distortion of reality. Distortion is a legitimate tool of art, and is expressive when _perceived_ as distortion, i.e. when the mind, consciously or unconsciously, measures it against a norm and feels the tension between reality and representation. A cubist portrait, however, makes the norm of visual reality irrelevant, and asks us to view the features of a face in abstract formal terms. In a Picasso, the meaning of a nose placed on the side of a head is purely aesthetic and has nothing to do with the significance of such a phenomenon occurring in reality, and for that reason we don't respond to it with the emotions we would experience in the latter case. We see a cubist portrait as aesthetic play, not as a contemplation of human misfortune.

Such abstract art is not "less suited to the human mind" than art which aims at expressing the "human condition," but it _is_ abstract - i.e., it extracts certain visual features of reality out of the larger context of meaning we normally attach to them in order to employ them for aesthetic effect. The question I'd ask here is whether atonal music does something analogous: whether tonality represents and expresses some basic or major aspect(s) of human existence which atonality forgoes for the sake of some other goal. If a misplaced nose or ear means something entirely different in a cubist portrait than it would in a realistic one, and doesn't evoke the emotions we experience were we to evaluate such a phenomenon against the "norm" of biological life, does a chord heard in an atonal work of music similarly forgo the emotional resonances it would have when heard against a "norm" of tonal organization? Is tonal organization in fact a "norm," a way of patterning musical sounds which satisfies with peculiar thoroughness the fundamental urge of the human brain for perceptual order, and which corresponds to and expresses basic dynamic patterns of thought and feeling? And if tonality does represent some sort of norm - as a glance at the near-universal existence of tonal systems in the world's music would suggest - is atonality in music an example of "abstraction," an aesthetic phenomenon similar to abstraction in painting? How far does the analogy go?

Just some thoughts on a Sunday morning.


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## Razumovskymas (Sep 20, 2016)

Woodduck said:


> Interesting observation about babies, and your imagery ( babies as art critics) gave me a chuckle. It seems to me you make a good point that could be expanded upon. But Improbus's point might be good too, differently stated.
> 
> A cubist portrait with misplaced facial features may very well fascinate a child old enough to see it as something other than frightening or random, but past a certain age we know that it's a distortion of reality. Distortion is a legitimate tool of art, and is expressive when _perceived_ as distortion, i.e. when the mind, consciously or unconsciously, measures it against a norm and feels the tension between reality and representation. A cubist portrait, however, makes the norm of visual reality irrelevant, and asks us to view the features of a face in abstract formal terms. In a Picasso, the meaning of a nose placed on the side of a head is purely aesthetic and has nothing to do with the significance of such a phenomenon occurring in reality, and for that reason we don't respond to it with the emotions we would experience in the latter case. We see a cubist portrait as aesthetic play, not as a contemplation of human misfortune.
> 
> ...


The funny thing is: Western tonal music IS abstract art. In fact it's the most advanced and complex form of abstract art there is. But because it's so integrated and like I said before, evolved along with human kind, we don't perceive it as abstract anymore. Comparisons with visual arts imo are misleading because music was abstract from day 1 while visual art was more a representation of reality (until abstract art came along). Even popular music is a quite advanced form of art which almost every one on this planet effortlessly enjoys and because of that isn't perceived as art anymore.

Tonal and atonal music are both abstract art forms. The big difference is that tonal has become so familiar to all of us that it has lost it's abstract "feel". Most people understand it to some extent. You can present any tonal work to anyone in the world and it will make some sense to that person. I guess for Schoenberg that became a bit boring (or threatening) and so he did what he did.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Razumovskymas said:


> The funny thing is: Western tonal music IS abstract art. In fact it's the most advanced and complex form of abstract art there is. But because it's so integrated and like I said before, evolved along with human kind, we don't perceive it as abstract anymore. *Comparisons with visual arts imo are misleading because music was abstract from day 1 while visual art was more a representation of reality (until abstract art came along)*. Even popular music is a quite advanced form of art which almost every one on this planet effortlessly enjoys and because of that isn't perceived as art anymore.
> 
> *Tonal and atonal music are both abstract art forms. The big difference is that tonal has become so familiar to all of us that it has lost it's abstract "feel".* Most people understand it to some extent. *You can present any tonal work to anyone in the world and it will make some sense to that person.* I guess for Schoenberg that became a bit boring (or threatening) and so he did what he did.


How abstract is abstract? I agree that music doesn't normally represent objects in the physical world (except in odd cases of imitation). But it seems to be common experience that music not only evokes but represents subjective experience - we feel that emotions are in some mysterious way actually _in_ the music, although that's strictly impossible - while the forms of visual art, when abstracted from objective representation, have an extremely limited capacity to function and affect us in that way.

I've suggested in previous posts here that music, while abstract in the sense of not depicting objects, actually does replicate dynamic patterns of emotional experience. These dynamic patterns are not the only features of music that affect us emotionally - tones themselves have a primal ability to move us - but I think they're the most potent factor, and the one that gives music's expressiveness the greatest specificity. Their potency derives from the fact that music, like emotion, unfolds in time, and from the fact that pattern-recognition is basic to the way the brain comprehends things.

For this reason, music's "objectification of the subjective" is abstraction in a sense, but less completely so than the visual forms and qualities of painting and sculpture which, first of all, are stationary in space rather than dynamic in time, and, second, function in normal perception as identifying components of visual reality in a way that musical tones do not. Walter Pater's famous aphorism that all the arts strive toward the condition of music contains the implication that they can't reach that goal.

With this idea of the source of music's expressive power in mind, I have to disagree with your statement that "the big difference [between tonal and atonal music] is that tonal has become so familiar to all of us that it has lost it's abstract 'feel'." I'd contend that the difference is that atonal music _acquired_ an abstract feel which tonal music never had. And that's why, as you point out, "you can present any tonal work to anyone in the world and it will make some sense to that person." Tonality represents something human brains recognize as basic to our subjective life. Atonality, as such, is an abstract idea which doesn't.


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