Nineteenth Century Atonality

[allegroamabile]

One pre-1900 atonal piece which I enjoy is the Yale-Princeton Football Game by Charles Ives which was written in 1898. Can somebody give me more examples of nineteenth century atonality. I am eager to find more.

[KGill]

Well, of course, there's extremely late Liszt. Or did you mean '20th-century style' atonality?

[sbeckmesser]

By early 19th-Century standards, parts of the Chaos section that opens Haydn's Creation are pretty atonal (i.e. no solid sense of key), as befits the subject matter. And Rebel's Les Elemens opens with an essentially atonal dissonance that is startling considering its date (1737). The composer, in his preface to the score says, “I dared to undertake to link the idea of the confusion of the elements [at the creation of the world] with that of confusion in harmony. I hazarded to make heard first all sound together or rather all of the notes of the octave united as a single sound.” The rest of the movement isn't nearly as daring, to 21st-Century ears.

--Sixtus

[allegroamabile]

What I am trying to get at here are examples of atonality to 20th century standards, just like in the Ives.

thanks

[Melodia]

Isn't the Ives piece bitonality?

He's about as non-tonal as you're going to get though, without traveling though the deep regions of obscuresville.

But of course, as mentioned there's Liszt, and hell you could even count Wagner (Tristan), and of course some Debussy, depending on just how far you want to go with it.

[Lyle Neff]

I would suggest that you check with scholarship on Ives to make sure about the date of the piece you mentioned. I've read that late in life he changed the dates on some of his compositions to make them look as if they were written earlier than they really were.

[sbeckmesser]

To quote the Schirmer Program Note that is the first thing to come up in a Google Search on this piece:
{
In The Yale-Princeton Football Game, Charles Ives depicts the 6-0 defeat of the Princeton Tigers by the Yale Bulldogs on November 20, 1897. After this game, the Yale football team went on to play an undefeated season. In the music, Ives condenses the game into two downs spread over three minutes, quoting various college songs, Yale football cheers, and other musical references along the way.

Ives’s sketches for the piece include the following annotations, with a new reference falling every few measures:

1. Suppressed excitement of players coming into grounds.
2. A Yale cheer, “Brekke coax” [sic]
3. Another cheer: “Rah, Rah, Rah; Rah Rah Rah; Rah Rah Rah; Yale Yale Yale.”
4. “Three Cheers for Old Nassau”
5. “Harvard has blue stocking girls, Yale has blue stocking men,” etc.
6. “Watch on the Rhein” (Die Wacht am Rhein)
7. “Hold the Fort, McClung is coming.”
8. “Reeves 2nd Regiments Quickstep” (always played by Brass Band at games and reunions etc.)
9. “Hy-can nuck-a-no”
10. “Dodging half-back”
11. “Fat Guards, pushing, grunting.”
12. “First Down.”
13. “Run around left end: loss.”
14. “Dodging tackle.”
15. “Close formation: Wedge”
16. “Last Down”
17. “Run around Right”
18. “When trumpet (=Running half-back [sic], Charley Desseaulles [sic]) reaches this measure, every other instrument must make a hell of a noise and stop”; “Touch Down.”
19. “Game over and won. Everybody tired, players and spectators.”
}
To judge by various snippets of the piece you can hear on the web, much of it consists of college and other popular melodies overlaid on each other in typically Ivesian style. And to judge by these snippets the work is NOT atonal in the Schoenberg-pre-serial or Berg-Wozzeck sense, nor in the Josef Mathias Hauer sense. It is instead polytonal, with the various melodies retaining their characteristic lines but in different keys. This is something very different from atonality, though it might sound atonal to some. A truly atonal football game would have to have distorted all the songs so much that many of them would be unrecognizable, which would defeat the purpose of the work altogether.

Ives is pretty much in a class by himself when it comes to his use of dissonance, especially with his use of tone clusters. These kinds of arbitrary dissonances are absent from most earlier music (except for that Rebel piece I cited and the organ tone cluster of Verdi's Otello that figures in other message threads), and weren't systematically followed up until, say, the works of Penderecki and Ligeti. I would therefore say that this Ives piece doesn't meet conventional 20th-century atonality standards (i.e. never at any time a sense of any key). The passage I cited from Haydn's Creation is, according to these standards, more atonal than the Ives.

BTW, Ives was also alleged to have taken his older scores and added dissonance to them in later years, also with the apparent intent of making them appear more modernistic than they originally were. Two of the work's 5 pages are said to be in penmanship of ca. 1914-1919 (see Note 4, p.484, J. Peter Burkholder, All Made of Tunes, Charles Ives and the Uses of Musical Borrowing). This reference also has the perfect description of the piece: a "polytonal quodlibet" (p.373).
--Sixtus

PS: The piece apparently exists only in sketch form and all the recordings of it that you may have heard are in a sense the work of the editor involved. And while I don't want to impugn the integrity of any editor, when it comes to judgement calls on an incomplete and possibly illegible manuscript it seems to me that it would be only human for an editor who wants to make Ives seem more "modern" to opt for the more dissonant interpretation of any doubtful note.

[allegroamabile]

I was aware that this piece could be polytonal, but I have not seen the music so I was not sure. I am still wondering if the piece was legitimately written in 1898.

Anyways, the Poulenc Clarinet Sonata is considered by many to be atonal, and it is much less dissonant than the Ives.

[sbeckmesser]

re the Poulenc, a piece that I do not know: One can have music that is atonal -- not utilizing the immense musical powers of key relationships and tonal melodies -- that is not grindingly dissonant. I hear much of Hindemith's music as atonal because of its frequent lack of musical and dramatic tension due to a lack of (or attenuation of) conventional harmonic patterns. It is for this reason that I don't like much of his music, which often sounds to me like directionless noodling. On the other hand it is possible to have truly atonal music that is capable of intense musical and dramatic tension, as in Berg's two operas (Wozzeck and Lulu), surely two of the greatest operas of the last century.

--Sixtus

[daphnis]

The Poulenc sonata was written at the end of his life and is not atonal, in fact it shares many characteristics with the oboe and flute sonati, all 3 of which were written towards the end.

[dwil9798]

I hear much of Hindemith's music as atonal because of its frequent lack of musical and dramatic tension due to a lack of (or attenuation of) conventional harmonic patterns. It is for this reason that I don't like much of his music, which often sounds to me like directionless noodling.

While Hindemith is not my most favorite composer, he is among my favorite to listen to. I would not describe him as atonal at all really, but more bitonal, as in Ives, due to Hindemith's use of layering. The opening of Mathis der Maler symphony shows how completely tonal elements merge into seemingly atonal elements. Along with Berg's operas, Hindemith's opera Sancta Susannah should be placed among them as the greatest operas of the twentieth century because of its intense musical and dramatic tension that you say his music lacks.

[allegroamabile]

The Poulenc sonata was written at the end of his life and is not atonal, in fact it shares many characteristics with the oboe and flute sonati, all 3 of which were written towards the end.

I asked a clarinettist getting her doctorate at Rice University what key is the Poulenc Sonata in and she said it was atonal.

[daphnis]

Because a piece doesn't not have a key signature doesn't necessarily mean it is without tonal center(s). Have you heard this piece?

[allegroamabile]

I have played it. Many composers did not use a key signature even though the piece might have been centered around a key, it still broke free of the normal harmony at many points in the work. I am pretty much just reporting what another clarinettist told me.

[steltz]

Just played the accompaniment to the Poulenc for a student of mine the other day. Your clarinettist friend is confusing dissonance with atonality. The piece (not to get into a long analysis) is too full of major and minor triads (albeit spiced up with other notes) to be considered atonal. In particular, at rehearsal 2 in the first movement, there is a clear D7 moving into a G chord, and though the G chord is not a Major or minor one, the reference to a dominant moving down a fifth places this firmly in tonal territory. Same at rehearsal 3 and 6 (though this last one is F# --> B). At rehearsal 8 there is an F--> Bb reference. And this type of dominant/tonic reference happens freqently in the piece.

The second movement runs are plain old A melodic minor, and the last movement begins and ends with C Major chords.

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