Berg
Berg was the least atonal of the early atonal composers. Sort of. What’s atonal music? Well, to make a long story short and slightly incorrect, it’s when instead of playing music using “keys” such as C Major, or G# Minor which use only a subset of available notes, you use every note equally. This movement popped up as a natural but extreme extension of all the dissonance that was sneaking in to music around the year 1900. Schoenberg invented it, and his students Berg and Webern were additional pioneers.
So what does it sound like? Well, to be honest it can be kind of difficult if you aren’t used to it, or even if you are used to it. It’s deliberately rebelling against the tonal systems which pretty much every other piece of music you have ever heard use, so that’s not exactly surprising. I often hear it as a bit similar to being in a room where lots of people are having conversations all at once, loudly. Intrigued yet?
The thing is, Berg kind of liked tonality, so although he basically followed the rules of atonality, he sort of twisted them into a lot of tonal constructs. That’s why I started out this description with that first sentence up there. It does depend on the particular composition though. From this point of view he is maybe the most accessible of the early atonalists (or second Viennese school). It’ll still be quite a shock though…
Musical Snippets
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This is from the “Lyric Suite” for string quartet, one of Berg’s most famous pieces (it’s worth noting by the way that these atonal guys published way fewer pieces than a lot of other composers) which uses a lot of the really strict method of atonal composing, called 12-tone. Pretty disjointed, huh?
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This snippet is from the violin concerto, the other ultra-famous piece of his. This demonstrates the heart-stoppinly beautiful tonalities which rise out of the 12-tone writing. This piece is doubly tragic: it was composed in memory of the death of a 17 year old Manon Gropius, one of Berg’s close friend’s daughters, but additionally Berg himself died immediately after finishing it.
