Me vs. Atonalism
May 4th, 2007 Posted in atonal, classical music, shostakovich
A post I wrote a few days ago has generated way more controversy than I though it would. The general gist of it is that I was dismissing the second Viennese school as being way over the top. I suggested that the future of classical music is the use of atonality as a contrasting key: instead of writing a piece in, say, c-major and modulating between that and c-minor (or a-minor), a piece will switch between tonality and atonality in a similar fashion, but not stick in the land of atonality.
In short, I feel that atonality in music should be a fleeting thing, because tonality speaks to something deep inside us. It is satisfactory on a fundamental level, as opposed to atonality, which is only satisfactory in an academic sense.
However, several people have expressed strong disagreement. Chris Culver says:
“If atonality isn’t your thing, fine. But it’s ridiculous for you to make universal pronouncements like “it sucksâ€, or that no one can understand it without the score (plenty of people can)”
I agree that maybe I was a tad harsh in my initial criticism, but I still feel that my point is basically true (for me at least, I understand that people are going to constantly disagree about music). However, I am certainly willing to accept that the tonal/atonal blend I was evangelizing would probably not have come about, if not for the dramatic steps of Berg, Webern and Schoenberg.
Matt commented that:
“I’m not sure that you really have a handle on what you’re talking about here. You’re conflating categories of music (â€atonalâ€, “serialâ€, “twelve-toneâ€) which are actually subsets of one another … The melodies in late Shostakovich are tonal.”
And then goes on to suggest six pieces I am completely unfamiliar with to better appreciate what the atonalists brought to the table – which I shall definitely work on acquiring. However, I strongly disagree with his latter statement that late Shostakovich is tonal. The principal themes in, say, the Violin Sonata (Op. 134) and the twelfth String Quartet (Op. 126) are tone rows, but he develops these as if they were tonal themes. That’s what I mean by developing atonal ideas in a tonal fashion.
As for atonal vs. serial vs. twelve-tone, I appreciate that the distinction is subtle, and kind of back-and-forth. As I understand it, atonalism (which really just means the absence of tonal center, which could almost apply to (some of) Debussy as well as Schoenberg) encompasses serialism (the strict use of twelve tone rows, each note in the scale used just as much as any other, in a specific order) which is almost the same as twelve-tone music (which might refer to less strict use of each note to an equal degree)
But, I’m fully prepared to be not quite correct about this… I’d be delighted to hear what you think. Comment below!
May 7th, 2007 at 3:53 am
its interesting to read your ideas and criticisms of atonal music. i think you hit an interesting vein here. atonal (or modern and/or contemporary) classical music is often highly revered in the academic circles and mostly despised by the casual concertgoer.
as with anything challenging, one might have to invest some time in it, get used to some new aesthetic values. . but there is a large audience for the stuff.
i sort of like to read your super subjective criticism that it all suck, but it goes against alot of academic literature AND there are many serious listeners who love it (myself included).
theres also the argument that atonal music was a step in the evolution of music; atonal eventually lead to electronic music, without which we wouldnt have any ghostface killah records!
May 7th, 2007 at 8:53 am
What you’re really talking about, I think, is not atonality but degrees of dissonance in the harmony, one “degree” being how long the dissonance lasts, and note-sequences you can or can’t recognize as melodic shapes.
Ironically, the photo of Wozzeck going mad comes from one of the most widely appreciated atonal works, Berg’s opera. It was a big success in its world premiere run back in 1925, and is the only atonal opera to have become part of the standard repertoire world-wide.
I believe this is because Berg varies the dissonance according to the character and the situation, and writes distinctive motifs and even outright melodies in folk or popular style that he brings back, Wagner-style, again and again. And just before the final scene comes a deeply sad orchestral interlude that’s firmly and deliberately in D minor.
Berg does much the same thing in his violin concerto, which tells a story, makes use of a popular tune, and at a dramatic turning point brings in a Bach chorale with its original harmonization. This in a 12-tone work, using a system which would seem meant to make such things impossible.
Personally, I find both of these works and some others by atonal and serial composers not just listenable but intensely moving, and not just because of the story that goes with the music. And some friends who aren’t at all sophisticated listeners have gone to see “Wozzeck” again and again. So maybe there’s something in this music for you too.
May 7th, 2007 at 11:56 am
It’s extremely difficult to use terms such as “dissonance”, “atonality”, and “chromaticism” in describing the overall acceptance level of a piece of music. That’s the wonderful thing about music itself.
Personally, I feel that the serial/twelve-tone movement of the 20th century was too limiting a format to survive in its strictest form.
(warning, controversy ahead)
I believe that movement was, in large part, a refuge for the incompetent. In a fascinating interview John Adams (Nixon in China, Short Ride in a Fast Machine, etc.) had some extremely unflattering things to say about the academic world he lived in when he was earning his degrees in music. Then, essentially anything you wrote that wasn’t 12-tone was belittled as crap. His reaction (thankfully for us) was “Hell no!”.
That is not to say that minimalism itself didn’t require evolution (compare early Philip Glass to his current music).
“Accessibility” is another popular term to describe to what degree a piece of music falls pleasingly on the ear. Therein lie many of the challenges and rewards of classical music listening. In today’s world, commercial success of music requires instant acceptance; it must work in one hearing, but it’s long-term survival is unimportant.
The rewards of Classical Music are derived over multiple hearings; and therein lies the problem. Bartok String Quartets, for example, don’t reveal their secrets in a single hearing; and that’s why you’ll hardly ever hear them on an NPR classical music station. But ask most Chamber Music lovers and performers, and they will urge patience through multiple hearings. That patience will be richly rewarded.
May 8th, 2007 at 5:04 am
I would be participating more in this debate were I not currently in a remote part of Russia. But here’s my two-cents so far:
Claiming that much modernistic writing is not “accessible” is to condemn traditional repertoire as well, because both are boring and opaque to something like 97% of the record-buying public.
It’s odd to pitch standard repertoire classical music as good for nerds since it’s fun to figure out how it works, while at the same time deploring modernism as too “academic”.
And Adams’ comment that the 12-tone school was a den of mediocrities is another inappropriate general statement. I personally would much rather listen to anything serialist than Adams’ works, which I find unexciting. The fact that there is an audience for modernism, even if it is a small one (but so is the general classical market) should show that it doesn’t universally suck.
November 28th, 2008 at 8:33 am
The real problem is that music developed from modernist philosophies (serialism, aleatorism, concretism, stochasticism, formalism) is in itself ideological.
Even Britten wrote that when music becomes ideological it stops being artistic and personal.
The philosophy of modernism is a nihilist ideology, which claims the inferiority of emotional content as naively romantic and anti-scientific, and claims the superiority of form. So when it is claimed that the essence of music resides in its form, the structural work behind music becomes more important than the content and the communicative potential which are actually denied. The compositive process is not anymore the creative work with the music language in order to communicate through music, but the structural calcous which forms the piece. The immanent structural function of music language is therefore considered more relevant than the perception of what is communicate through the language.
Basically whatever person would tell you that what matters about a book is the content, what the words means, a modernist would tell you that what matters is the structure, the material and the novelty of the language, not the content which is irrelevant.
So the real problem is not that music naturally evolved from tonality to atonality (this is just a myth, acoustically there’s no such a thing as an evolution to atonality and there are actually scientific basis to believe that we are naturally wired to tonality) but that the whole real of “contemporary classical music” started militantly and dogmatically following and promoting a philosophy which many didn’t relate to and which many didn’t agree with.
It’s a bit as if all “high cuisine” started to follow vegetarian precepts and made it necessary to be a vegetarian and philosophically related to vegetarian ideologies in order to enjoy and understand your meals.
It would become an elitist sect, which clearly would stop relating to people who have different ideologies or avoid being blinded by ideologies.
The other problem is that as with all ideologies, contemporary music produced an high level of fanatism. Its dogmatic proselytists started a campaign (especially in accademies) to convert everyone, dissent was censored by claiming you are NOT dissenting because you don’t agree with the philosophy but simply because you’re stupid and ignorant.
There is no virtual commitee establishing what music is art and what is not, what music is serious and what is not, what music has value and what is not, what music deserve to be in history books and future history books and what not.
Contemporary music is not a simple evolved style which people haven’t yet accepted, it is an ideology taking over a whole category of music and creating a pure regime, creating music which suits the postulates of a certain vision and philosophy, allowing no dissent, no pluralism and no opposed views. It is non-religious fundamentalist at its core.
If we speak about music as MUSIC as an artistic expression of human communication and social aggregation, then there would be many different aestethic philosophies as to what music is supposed to communicate and how. The very fact that there’s a single totalitarian ideology in contamporary music quarters, says it all about the truth of what happened with the whole modernist and school of vienna dogmas.
It is not music anymore, it is just pure ideological violence. The problem is not that people don’t understand this music, the problem is that most of them are not interested with the view this kind of music promotes, they’re not interested in form over content, they’re not interested in experimentalism for the sake of it, they’re not interested in structure over perception, they’re not interested in nihilism and cynicism, they’re not interested in fake novelty for obsession over the means of communication rather than what is communicated.
That people should learn music technique in order to understand the music produced in accademies is completely ridicolous and hallucinated. Art is also the ability to turn the complex into the simple, and the skill of the creator is to use complex means to semplify the end result.
No one should need to be a painter to relate to a painting, no one should need to be sculptur to related with a sculpture and no one should be a musician to related to music.
What is all fridge technicians started to make fridges that only as long as you know how to create a circuit and break down technical parts, you can use to refrigerate foods.
What is every expert in a field, started to create only for the other other experts in that field, requiring you to study 5 years before you can relate to the creation of another human being. If contemporary composers were even remotely intellectually honest and coherent they would start to learn chess, sport, sculpting, fotography, cinema, electronics (and so on) techniques, before they even start to relate with other human activities and thought expect their own expertise.
But since contemporary composers are exentially living contradictions, they would never consider anything not post-tonal and formalist worth of discussion, but would still discuss the Harry Potter movie they saw, the beautiful car they drove and the lasagne they ate. While coherency with their ideologies should compell them to wear wax and leaves instead of clothes, watch only black and white 8 hours long abstract movies, use only bycicles made with animal corpses and eat only rotten fish over a bad of gorgonzola and chocolate.
November 28th, 2008 at 10:14 am
Ideological douchebaggery is detestable regardless of what it’s promoting, but you seem to be have conflated the method of promotion with the thing that’s being promoted. Even if music making use of atonal idioms does so for ‘the wrong reasons’, that’s self-evidently independent of its artistic worth.
What you’re saying in your concluding paragraphs is that elitism implies people shouldn’t deal with things to which they are not intimately accustomed, which, frankly, it doesn’t. It makes perfect sense to suggest that someone may or may not gain a full appreciation of something depending upon their exposure to the medium. If something can genuinely be appreciated then it is artistically ‘justified’, regardless of the depth of knowledge or understanding required. Art isn’t ‘inherently populist’, and taking that stance pretty clearly limits what art can achieve (and on the way incidentally condemns classical music, tonal or otherwise). Your objection to ideological suppression by atonalists, which I have to take your word for, equally applies in reverse: “There is no virtual commi[t]tee establishing what music is art and what is not”.
That atonalism has extended the ‘vocabulary’ of composition alone justifies it.
September 21st, 2011 at 6:00 pm
First, in response to the article,
It makes no sense to say that it is ‘valid’ to use “a little” atonalism, but not to let it get too far. If you said “I don’t like complete atonalism”, that would be different, but the fact is that much of the music made throughout time will not appeal to your taste, and yet it is still just as valid as the music you do like. Why be this picky? It’s like saying, “F# should only be used once in a piece… I don’t like it.”
In response to the comment made by Daniel,
The fallacy here, I think, is that you’re being too reactionary. Yes, part of the drive of atonalism was rebellion, but a composer does not do something simply ‘to drive a point home’. To a composer (not someone who makes jingles, but I refer here to an artistic composer) one’s art is IMPORTANT. (I wish I could use italics, all caps sound dumb, but I wish to emphasize this.) Schoenberg’s Third Quartet WAS beautiful to him, just in an unorthodox way. And atonalism gave him the freedom to create it. It’s beautiful to me too, I actually enjoy atonal music. But it’s like learning a new language, you can’t expect to know Spanish without literally years of work.
Another thing you said:
“No one should need to be a painter to relate to a painting, no one should need to be sculptur to related with a sculpture and no one should be a musician to related to music.”
Sorry, but this is the reality of art. Even if you can relate to a painting, you cannot relate to it in the same way a painter can. The same goes for music. The connection is just far different. Yes, music has a universal quality, but there are some elements of music that can’t be appreciated by someone who doesn’t play music (think counterpoint, modulations, etc). It just so happens that a composer, for instance, will more likely find the theoretical complexities of a piece beautiful than will an average listener.
Think of people who walk through a museum, glancing for 5 and a half seconds at each piece. A painter doesn’t do this, because a painter knows what it’s like to work a month on a piece, to LIVE with it. You can’t understand that without having done art.
” Art is also the ability to turn the complex into the simple”
Says who? I love me some complexity. What YOU find beautiful need in no way define “what art is”.
What I DO agree with you on is this – there is a definite adherence to “the canon of Classical works” in the Classical world. This does manifest itself in a certain ‘snobishness’, condescending attitudes toward other genres. I abhor this.
Music boils down to this: A composer should create music, not for the people to love, not for the people to hate, but that sounds however the COMPOSER wishes it to sound. Those who hate it can respectfully leave. Those who love it? Well even if it can only touch one person, is that not reason enough to compose?
January 3rd, 2012 at 5:06 pm
Atonal music can be dramatic: provocative of far deeper feelings than a lot of tonal music.
The problem is: the author of this post seems to only be aware of a handful of atonal composers: seeming to believe that a prerequisite has been met to describe atonal music in general.
Chances are, you probably haven’t heard music like:
-Lutoslawski Symphony no. 2 and 3
-Perle Sinfonietta 2
-Wuorinen 2 Part Symphony
-Carter Symphony of 3 Orchestras
-Knussen Flourish with Fireworks
-Boulez Explosiant Fixe
Among others. Serialism has come a long way since the 50s…