Atonal MusicJanuary 28th, 2010

This week, let us focus on the break-up of tonality, initiated in the late nineteenth century and clearly confirmed during the early twentieth century. With several articles about atonal, dodecaphonic music and serial music I want to make a few preliminary remarks before discovering the universe of a key figure in the postwar music world: Pierre Boulez.

Atonal: having no established key (Collins). Atonality is a state in which all the rules and tonal functions are suspended. No more tonic, dominant, disappearance of consonance-dissonance axis, etc, in fact it represents the simple end of the laws on which has been based all Western music since the Baroque period (even middle ages, since modal system is not atonal). In an atonal system, the twelve tones of the chromatic scale are considered as equal, and the dissonance is not an episodic thing anymore.

It is difficult to date precisely the emergence of atonality because the atonal system did not appear suddenly but is a result of a slow evolution of the tonal system. We could see its roots in the Wagnerian chromaticism and since the mid-nineteenth century, and atonality gradually invaded the harmonic and contrapuntal writing. One of the most striking examples of the late nineteenth century is perhaps the prescient Bagatelle without tonality of Franz Liszt, composed in 1885.

But soon a character quickly became a key figure in the atonal world: Arnold Schoenberg. Upon his sextet Transfigured Night written in 1899, his path was defined. But we have to wait until 1908 and his second quartet to speak of conscious and systematic atonality which culminates in 1912 with Pierrot Lunaire. As for Schoenberg, the abolition of rules, the total freedom of the latter work has raised the question of the coherence of this new atonal world. He quickly felt the need to organize this chaotic world with new rules. The dodecaphonic system was born.

If Arnold Schoenberg and the Viennese School characterize the early atonal music, they are not the only ones to seriously blow the tonal system. Indeed, the French Impressionists were already deviating from this system and other composers have used atonal elements in their writing: for example Arthur Honneger, Bela Bartok or Stravinsky who, even after refusing almost all his life this system, introduced serialism into his works after Schoenberg’s death.

I would like to recall a word of Pierre Boulez, which is a good definition of this period: “The atonality is essentially a transitional period, being strong enough to break the tonal universe, not being coherent enough to generate a non-tonal one.” (« L’atonalité est essentiellement une période de transition, étant assez forte pour briser l’univers tonal, n’étant pas assez cohérente pour engendrer un système non tonal. »). In the next post, we will focus on the construction of a coherence in the atonal universe through dodecaphonism.

Related Posts :

• Sur Incises
• The twelve-tone technique
• The little story of musical notation 4/4
• Musical Aesthetics