Nineteenth Century Atonality

[pml]

This reference (J. Peter Burkholder, All Made of Tunes, Charles Ives and the Uses of Musical Borrowing, p.373) also has the perfect description of the piece: a "polytonal quodlibet".
--Sixtus

Quite so - and such pieces had been written around for a lot longer than the nineteenth century; there is a tradition going back to the Baroque (e.g. Biber, "Die liederliche geselschafft von allerley Humor" from the Battalia) and Renaissance (various anonymous pieces). The Biber is marvellously dissonant and refuses to resolve, finishing on two dissonant chords, but the dissonance arises out of eight polytonal lines - like the Ives or Poulenc, I would not call them atonal in the twentieth century sense. ;)

[vinteuil]

Well, the famous part in the Mozart K 550 (the beginning of the developement of IV) is about as atonal as it gets: something like 10 tones treated as equals.

[Lyle Neff]

As a general observation: presence of triads does not guarantee establishment of a tonal center, just as the lack of triads does not preclude tonality.

[daphnis]

The beginning of Act 1, Scene 3 in Wagner's Siegfried at Mime's waking nightmare ("Verfluchtes Licht!") is very loosely tonal, and many have considered it to be the earliest example of atonality in the 19th Century.

[vinteuil]

Frankly, the dukas piano sonata is very, very close, but I don't think it's actually 19th Century.
Now Biber isn't either, but...

[sbeckmesser]

If pre-tonal pieces can be considered atonal, there are some wildly chromatic moments in Gesualdo madrigals that are decidedly non-modal and can be heard as non-tonal or polytonal. And this is at the beginning of the 17th Century! Unfortunately, IMSLP doesn't have the 6th Book, which contains the wildest pieces, in modern-notation score form yet. This would be an ideal -- and relatively simple -- project for those amateur engravers who are always looking for something to set (we don't need yet another version of the Brandenburg Concerti).

--Sixtus

[musician]

Please tell the clarinet-playing Rice doctoral candidate (previous post) the difference between tonality, functional tonality and atonality. The clarinet sonata is tonal, but it doesn't use traditional functional tonality. Freshmen in most B.Mus courses know this.

[Rob Peters]

Fun, digging up 3 years old threads

The absence of a tonal centre is what makes music atonal, not the absence of functional harmony.
For instance, as a composer I still use traditional key indications, in order to fixate the tonal centre of the piece. But that doesn't mean the pieces adhere to the laws of traditional harmony, since all kinds of non-triadic chords are treated as consonants. But they can't be called atonal either. It's kind of a grey area.

[reiner torheit]

Poulenc was born in 1899, and thus lived only his first year in the C19th. I doubt that he produced much in that year - well, not much music, anyhow

Finding atonality in works by a composer who died in 1963 is hardly surprising

Busoni - who was teaching harmony and counterpoint in Berlin in the 1920s, at the end of his long life - claimed that Wagner had been singlehandedly responsible for the destruction of tonality. In fact it made Busoni so angry, that he wouldn't even name Wagner in his lectures, instead referring to him as "Herr W" or "that Man". The whole issue of tonality became politicised in Germany in the 1930s - absence of tonality was used as a criterion to have composers such as Weill, Hindemith and Schoenberg blacklisted as 'degenerate'. The whole system of Schenkerian analysis was devised as a litmus test to 'prove' the existence of tonality in works. It's surprising how this tool of the Third Reich passed into the curriculae of universities through Europe and N America, and is still given academic credence even today

[Joseph Noelliste]

Frequent student mistake, but dissonance does not equal atonality -- you have to analyze further . . . . . . (I just know that is a favourite pasttime of students!)

This is so true. Dissonance does not equal atonality by a long shot. All atonal works will contain dissonance of some sort, however, all pieces that contain dissonance aren't necessarily atonal. Clear enough...but, what sort of dissonance is needed to identify a work within the atonal category? It seems that the dissonance needs to attain a level of potency that is strong enough to obscure any sense of a tonal center. This is where things become woefully unclear and highly subjective. The point at which dissonance destroys our ability to sense a tonal center is different for every listener. Additionally, this point is not fixed - as a listener's aural mechanism matures, this point changes position. For example, at age 30, one might begin to hear a tonal center in a work whereas at age 20, one could not.

I believe we need to update our aural skills training to qualify dissonance types just as we have done with modulation types. An undergrad music major will have the aural tools to differentiate common-tone modulations, chromatic mediant relations, enharmonic reinterpretation, modulation to closely related keys and so forth; but, can we "hear" the many different types of dissonance out there? We can definitely analyze it...but can we hear it? I know this is a tall order and frankly impossible with certain types of dissonance. Yet, I still believe there are many types of dissonance that we can train ourselves to hear. Until our ears evolve, we will continue to listen to new works that will "sound" atonal to us only to find that after analysis, they are not.

Joseph Noelliste
Solo Pianist and Composer
www.jnoelliste.com
www.facebook.com/jnoelliste
jnoelliste@gmail.com

[Eric]

All atonal works will contain dissonance of some sort

Also not true- otherwise, all it would take for a work to be tonal, would be avoidance of dissonance. Not so; it takes work to establish a key... (if tonality means anything and is not a term being bandied about, anyways.)

[Joseph Noelliste]

All atonal works will contain dissonance of some sort

Also not true- otherwise, all it would take for a work to be tonal, would be avoidance of dissonance. Not so; it takes work to establish a key... (if tonality means anything and is not a term being bandied about, anyways.)

Good day Eric,
Thanks for your critique! I agree that it does take work to establish a key. Ideally, we need a harmonic pathway through the phrase model i.e. Tonic - Predominant - Dominant - back to Tonic which is affirmed with a Perfect Authentic Cadence.

I think, however, that you inferred more from my comment than I certainly intended.
To clarify - My claim is ONLY that - All atonal works will contain dissonance of some sort.
Note, this doesn't mean that -
1. Atonal works are the ONLY pieces that contain dissonance or in other words,
2. Tonal works are somehow not allowed to contain dissonance because atonal works contain it.

I must also add that level of dissonance or the lack thereof is only ONE of MANY parameters that should factor into the tonal/atonal distinction.

In spite of this clarification, your critique still raises an interesting question...

As we know, a tonal work can be highly dissonant. The tonal frameworks boasts many techniques for the employment of dissonance, such as Passing and Neighbor figurations (from simple melodic notes to full chords and even entire key areas), suspensions, pedal points etc. - a big topic for sure.

Is is possible for a tonal work (via the techniques listed above) to contain a higher level of dissonance than an atonal work?
To push the matter even further -
Is it possible for an atonal work to contain no dissonance whatsoever?
This is indeed what Eric is positing here. If so, then my claim (That all atonal works will contain dissonance of some sort) would be false. Also, the dissonance content of a work would have nothing to do with its classification as tonal or atonal.

Does anybody know of a piece of music that should be classified as atonal yet contains no dissonance?

Joseph Noelliste
Solo Pianist and Composer
www.jnoelliste.com
www.facebook.com/jnoelliste
jnoelliste@gmail.com

[Eric]

(Like Schoenberg, I prefer the term pantonality, but language doesn't listen to... er... anyway.)

If I had to start looking it might be in the general direction of some works by Satie or more recent music (the word New Age comes to mind though I'm out of my knowledge range.) Something where every chord is consonant and left to itself would be either a key-center or very near one (one thinks of Schoenberg's analysis of the opening of the finale of Beethoven's 8th quartet as hearable as C major heading off to E minor until later events clarify, and similar things... anyway... right... sorry.. .a bit offtopic there...) but the overall sequence doesn't establish any key at all even to (the average, fairly enhanced, trained to accept sevenths and ninths as consonances) modern sensibility.

(I keep thinking, too, of the ending of Roger Sessions' (12-tone and serial, I think...) 3rd symphony. Unison, which is a bit of a cheat, I guess, ending, so no question of harmonic progressions on that last page, but still, the notes are so ordered as to make it sound like a slightly off, chromatic (well,a fter all, all notes of the chromatic scale are there...) but still convincing cadence right into D-flat major (and ending A-flat E-flat C D-flat)... the 3rd symphony as a whole is less rebarbative (with a fairly quiet first movement in which I hear birdsongs...) than his 2nd symphony, which is tonal (D minor, finale in D major), but (the 2nd symphony) quite a lot louder, angrier and in several senses including the usual more dissonant.

[sbeckmesser]

Does anybody know of a piece of music that should be classified as atonal yet contains no dissonance?

A perfect 5th at the beginning of a piece is not (yet) tonal and yet is a perfect (non-dissonant) interval. Thus qualifies the opening of Beethoven's 9th as well as of Thus spake Zarathustra (R. Strauss), which doesn't technically become tonal until the last 16th note of measure 6.

--Sixtus