Kenneth Laino
I. What's Atonality?
Unfamiliarity is the foundation of atonal music; a musical genre whose base deprives the wired human being mind's desire of an tonal resolution. In a way the whole movements is seen as anarchical manifestation. For generations it's been ingrained inside our traditional western culture for music to stay in a specific key or to develop the thought of tonality, where music plays at the constant ebb and flow of resolution and tension - yet such rules that seemed natural to the existence of interesting music are cyclically toyed, left behind, and reinvented. The present day era was prime for such radical changes in idea. To avoid a time of resignation, leaps of defiance were explained and claimed to achieve a feeling of improvement and identity. Consequently we can view the test of atonal music as ". . . seen as a the occurrence of pitches in novel combinations, as well as by the incident of familiar pitch combinations in unfamiliar conditions" (Forte 1977, 1). Atonality in its broadest sense is music that lacks a tonal center or key, it refuses to conform to something of tonal hierarchy, where pitches concentrate on a single, central firmness, and instead retorts with mastery of impartial function for the creation of new origins- thus atonality is encouraged.
II. Origins: The Development of Impressionism and Expressionism
The early on 20th century was a culmination of artistic endeavors, experimenting in various styles both in the visible and audial mediums. The main proponents explored in this musical age could be the inclusion of impressionism and expressionism. For a brief look into the musical world of impressionism there is leading information, Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, both of whom were dissuaded by their brands given by critiques, that "imbeciles call 'impressionism', a term hired with the utmost inaccuracy. " An aesthetic and philosophical term borrowed from the parallel, creative revolution; a vivid analogy to painters who would give attention to the audience belief to achieve a standard impression. Simply put, the main element goal was to arouse feelings and convey moods, and as such various composers in Traditional western classical music followed suite coming to the defining feature of the whole impressionism movement: "color" or in musical terms, timbre. Displaying panoramas through orchestration, harmonic usage, and consistency. Other elements developed included the general use of new chord combinations (which were unresolved such as the 9th, 11ths, 13ths), ambiguous tonality, extended harmonies, parallel movements, "extra-musicality", and relishing on top, the use settings and incredible scales. In order to capture "a feeling of detached observation, " the normal syntax is usually disrupted and specific styles are carry through to keep that integrity of the work's meaning. Already essential themes or templates to the era including experimentation for the medium's progress, the damage of more developed systems, expressing the average person, and leaving the tonal key. As the mostly French centered on Impressionism, the equivalent movement with their competitors, the Germans, will focus on music in a different way; thus Expressionism is around. The underlying construct in Expressionism is internal rather than artistic. With the arrival of influential psychoanalysis studies, such as Sigmund Freud, making people think about the explanations why they behave in certain ways, slow the greater oppressed, twisted side of the individuals psyche. Expressionism got a dark, strong color and unlike Impressionism - were generally not only instrumental, in reality operas were a hallmark of the styles to be able to reciprocate the storyplot of people's activities. In the 20th century there exists finally variety in the ways of expression. In order to truly create tension or the sense of the person damage, Atonality is a great tool to mention that. The music lacks emphasis and doesn't have a sense of path as we're dependent on habits and repetition to steer us - thus we move away from a tonal key - and instead builds an exuberant amount of stress in the point of view of possibly someone's personal strife and the general mental condition. The market leaders of this activity would be Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg. Alban Berg would use structures well-known and prey on them. For example an opera by him, "Wozzeck" is common in it having three-acts labeled as "Exposition, Development, and Catastrophe". He leads us into the considered a sonata pattern where the end is a typical tragedy. Being faithful to custom, each action has 5 views familiar to a balanced classical style. However these characteristics are just for surface charm - they're twisted - each take action is a couple of variations, inserting it under new framework. It attempts to drive the listener it away a sense of tonality. And he uses Sprechstimme, a compositional strategy similar to modern day improvisation where the rating for the singer would be specified rhythms but intentionally be still left without the notes which created a organized eery sound where in fact the pitches aren't given and lost a path of key, and possibly amplified with the abandonment of lyrics for spoken words. Techniques and styles that were the byproduct of expressionism and impressionism were essential to advancement of atonality in the 20th century split in music.
III. Writing Atonal Music : 12 Shade Technique
After the deaths of Mahler (1911) and Debussy in (1918) the globe was available to pushing the boundaries of traditional western harmonies. Actually a small 20th century break up developed between tonal composers, business lead by composers such as Igor Stravinsky, noticed over a continuous progression of the tonal system, extending on musical ambiguity but still remained in the confines of the well-established tonal system. Eventually this process would lead to a point of no go back - which "serial" or non-tonal composers would turn to, such as Arnold Schoenberg, whom dove right to a convulsive change of the tonal system to a complete new terms of music. Certainly disputes which side truly represented modern music were raised, Stravinsky almost moving over tonality on and off versus Schoenberg who announced a complete break in the action with tonality and symmetric syntactic constructions. Yet they distributed the desire; to increase expressive vitality in music.
Arnold Schoenberg was an Austrian composer and conductor who migrated to America during WWII. During his time, he centered on promoting new music to the world to advance a feeling of progress, and therefore reinforced new ideas and impressionist motions in his works. In 1905 he made up "Pelleas and Melisande" a favorite story at that time which importantly presented the first use of an trombone glissando within an art music. Little by little, we sense pleas to escape the chains of tonality, with his development of Quaternary Harmonies (building chords on fourths) in pieces such as "Kammersymphonie" (this means chamber symphony) in 1907 as affected by the impressionists who would use these quartal chords since it didn't lead everywhere. Eventually he would have dissonance that never resolve - a lingering stress. In 1909 he would depart writing key signatures in any way! His first part resembling any form of atonality would truly be his Opus 11. A string quartet with a soprano words rejecting tonality would sing "Ich fјhle Luft von einem anderen Planeten" ("Personally i think air of another planet") And thus breath was finally spoken, which lead to the idea of free atonality (which would not be until his Opus 25, the first use of his 12-tone strategy). Atonality at that time seemed to fulfill the condition of improvement and continue intimate appearance from Mahler and it appeared to be the next reasonable and unavoidable milestone; however, by getting a useless through the abandonment of all the rules and total liberty from constraints made it difficult to hear. Despite having the intuitively brilliant syntax of these works, unfortunately, it was hard for the composer and listener to stay away from the innate drive for atonality. The test to move away from tonality sadly ended with the burdening sense for an answer, without a working structure, and with no cues or signs for standard memorability. In the long run " if you paid attention to Atonal Music you'll know why it's never used again. " (Luthye, 2017)
In order to commence writing atonal music like Schoeneberg, let's give attention to the most basic compositional strategy in writing for the serial method (which is by using all 12 shades all the time but without any tonal romantic relationship). The purpose of atonality is to move from a certain key. Tonality is developed through the repetition records and thus notes must equally used without a specific relation.
In the Twelve-Tone System or Dodecaphonic Strategy you create a build row, however unlike Debussy who always stayed with in the main element, it must use all 12 tones before it can replicate the tones. After writing a shade with 12 different shades the goal is avoid repetition to maintain interest and avoid making that tone row the new tonal centre.
Common modifications include, a retrograde, playing all notes in the build row backwards and an inverse, playing all notes in intervals of the contrary direction (notes go equidistant in half-steps but in the opposite direction. ) Keep in mind however a tri-tone period would remain the same as they're equidistant. Following that the music can be simply written with personal variant; with multiple applications such as an inverse-retrograde and retrograde-inverse, variety of rhythms, and having a variety of build rows - the options are endless, so get creative!
Atonality took its roots in being a product of a period of extreme creative progress. Though its lack of ability to be thought as skill, or even attractive lead to its downfall - its experimentation wasn't in vain. Though not completely used, it revealed us the restrictions of music and broadened musical appearance in pure variety; enabling full control of chromaticism and modulation still seen today in Jazz.
Sources:
- Beach, David (ed. ). 1983. "Schenkerian Analysis and Post-Tonal Music", Areas of Schenkerian Theory. New Haven: Yale University or college Press.
- Forte, Allen. 1977. The Structure of Atonal Music. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-02120-2.
- Kostka, Stefan and Payne, Dorothy (1995). Tonal Tranquility. Third Release. ISBN 0-07-300056-6.
- Schoenberg, Arnold. 1978. Theory of Harmony, translated by Roy Carter. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University or college of California Press.
- Zimmerman, Daniel J. 2002. "Families without Clusters in the first Works of Sergei Prokofiev". PhD diss. Chicago: School of Chicago.
