- Related Topics:
- music
- 12-tone music
- What is atonal music?
atonality
atonality, in music, the absence of a central key, or tonal center, that organizes the pitches and harmonies of a composition. In tonal music, melodies and chords generally create a sense of movement toward and away from a central pitch, or the tonic. Atonal music avoids establishing such a hierarchy, allowing the pitches of the chromatic scale to function more independently of a single tonal center.
Atonality became particularly important in Classical music (Western art music) during the early 20th century and is closely associated with Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg and his students Alban Berg and Anton Webern, collectively known as the Second Viennese School.
Evolution from chromatic harmony
For several centuries, much Classical music was based on functional harmony, a system in which chords have particular relationships to a key and create patterns of tension and resolution. During the 19th century, composers increasingly expanded this system through chromaticism—the use of pitches outside a composition’s basic major or minor scale. Composers such as Richard Wagner pushed chromatic harmony particularly far. In works such as Tristan und Isolde (1859), harmonies frequently delay expected resolutions and make the tonal center less immediately apparent. Other late 19th- and early 20th-century composers similarly explored increasingly complex harmonic relationships.
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Schoenberg took a further step beginning about 1908, composing works that no longer consistently established a traditional key. He and other composers instead used elements such as melody, rhythm, dynamics, texture, recurring motives (short, memorable musical phrases), and relationships between intervals to create structure and coherence. This approach is often referred to as free atonality because it predates Schoenberg’s later system for organizing all 12 pitches of the chromatic scale. Important early examples include Schoenberg’s Three Piano Pieces, Op. 11 (1909), and the monodrama Erwartung (1909). His song cycle Pierrot Lunaire (1912), one of the best-known works associated with early atonality, combines an unconventional approach to pitch with distinctive instrumental colors and Sprechstimme, a vocal technique between speech and singing.
Atonality and 12-tone music
Atonality should not be confused with 12-tone music, wherein compositions utilize all 12 tones related only to one another. In this system, a composer arranges all 12 pitches of the chromatic scale into an ordered sequence called a tone row. The row and transformations provide a framework for organizing pitches throughout a composition. Twelve-tone technique gave Schoenberg a systematic means of organizing music without relying on traditional major and minor keys. Berg and Webern adopted and adapted the method, which influenced numerous later composers.
Atonality in practice
The distinction between tonal and atonal music is not always absolute. A composition considered atonal may temporarily emphasize particular pitches or contain chords and passages that suggest a familiar key. Conversely, a tonal composition may contain passages in which the tonal center is deliberately obscured. Atonality also does not mean an absence of musical organization. Instead, composers may create unity through recurring intervals and motives, rhythmic patterns, symmetry, instrumental timbre, dynamics, and other structural relationships rather than through conventional functional harmony.
Atonal techniques became an important part of 20th-century Modernist music, being used in widely differing ways by various composers, including Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern. Although atonality challenged conventions that had shaped much Western art music for centuries, it provided composers with new ways of organizing pitch and creating musical tension, expression, and form.
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