Good atonal stuff

(haha i wz gnna suggest WEBERN but that is mostly under two mins!)

is that atonal?

not atonal

Steve Reich

not atonal

but atonal means bad if your intention wasn't to make atonal music, right?

It would be harder than you think to accidentally make atonal music.

vacuum is more like found sound and steve reich is just, well, steve reich.

*rules as gamed in various ways at various times

the shaggs aren't in tune all the time but they aren't atonal

"just banging around" sounds like yr decisions abt where to move next and how to end aren't axiomatically constrained, hence probbly atonal by default

malcolm williamson used a chorus of vacuum cleaners in his opera abt the 1902 martinique eruption -- i saw it on telly (in abt 1903) but only really remember how lame the volcano SFX were :(

(i can't remember if futurist instruments included "suckers" as well as "blowers" but it's in the spirit of the project)

I think it's better to say that it means "isn't built around or doesn't imply a tonal center/centers." But this is one of those arguments that people are always having and will never be resolved.

well i guess there's some overlap between found and atonal

but by defn he gives vacuums and reich tape pieces are BOTH atonal, surely?

(vacuums maybe have a "tonal centre" in the sense that they have a default vibrational pattern with a dominant loudest pitch, but do the non-default vibrations "imply" this centre?)

pioenner electronic composer gordon mumma used to argue that circuit boards WERE the composition, like staff-and-dots for tonal music, so he wd answer YES! -- but i still think the the direction of the implication can only discovered empirically)

I second the recommendation of Glenn Branca's the Ascension and suggest that to really appreciate it, you have to buy a NEW copy of the remastered CD available at the following places:

US:
http://www.carparkrecords.com/acute_US.html

Canada and Mexico:
http://www.carparkrecords.com/acute_canada_mex.html

Anywhere Else:
http://www.carparkrecords.com/acute_anywhereelse.html

Nipples by Brotzmann sextet?

that's probably true -- i've only ever been much interested in his early stuff and i tend to misperceive what he did via that lens

I think he's right though.

eg webern's klavierstuck op.post. isn't tonal, it's 12-tone: obviously just being notated by dots-and-stave isn't what makes it tonal or 12-tone; it's where the actual notes themselves are placed that does this, ie the SHAPE of the composition; similarly, it's the shape of the "composition" (ie the layout of the actual circuit-board itself)* which makes a vacuum-cleaner's hum "[a-ron]tonal" (if it does) -- and not for example oscillatory, or rising in pitch until it bursts into flame

*not the fact that it's a circuit-board, but the layout of the circuit-board

mumma's YES in my gag is to the idea that the non-dominant vibrational tendencies do indeed imply the vibrational centre (which is what a-ron needed to be arguing) IF there is one and IF you agree with mumma that the circuitboard specific to the electronic device is the composition

I can understand that a vacuum cleaner would be tonal, but is human speech inherently tonal in and of itself? I suppose you could say Reich is creating tone when he layers copies of the same voice recording out of phase, but pieces like "Come Out" are more about rhythm. I wouldn't use them as examples of "atonal"; they're more "non-tonal."

Interestingly, in the '80s Reich began using spoken word recordings as a source of melody in pieces like "Different Trains" by repeating them and having instruments "mickey mouse" the pitches of the spoken phrases (see also Scott Johnson's "John Somebody"). For some reason I think those pieces are annoying but I dig "Come Out" a lot.

Interestingly, in the '80s Reich began using spoken word recordings as a source of melody in pieces like "Different Trains" by repeating them and having instruments "mickey mouse" the pitches of the spoken phrases (see also Scott Johnson's "John Somebody"). For some reason I think those pieces are annoying but I dig "Come Out" a lot. "

OTM. Saved me some typing.

See also

Tony Conrad - 4 Violins (most other stuff involving tony conrad is atonal - especially 'Joan of arc'). 4 Violins is utterly utterly awesome. He's playing in the turbine hall at tate modern in London in april.
Much, but not all of, Upgrade and Aferlife by Gastr del Sol
La Monte Young (even though he is a total dick)
Henry Flynt (e.g C tune, purified by the fire)
Jacob Kierkegaard - 4 Rooms (worth reading how he made this as it's very interesting)

But describing these sounds as "atonal" is kind of missing the point. This music is, more specifically, "tape collage", "found sound", "serialist", or "for unpitched percussion".

To me, the term "atonal" best describes music that still exists within the boundaries of standard harmonic convention, yet doesn't revolve around any particular tonal centre.

I'm specifically thinking of Bartok, some early Stravinsky, Hindemith, Ligeti, Wychnegradsky, Ustvolskaya, Captain Beefheart. There are chords, there are melodies, and there are cadences, but there is no tonality.

My favourite "atonal" work is Hindemith's Ludus Tonalis, which isn't really deliberately atonal, but rather a re-imagining of the rules of tonality.

it's absolutely true that as a technical term atonal was formerly applied much more narrowly, as a way-station definition before the dust of the first part of the 20th century cleared, to the kind of composition which was placing itself after the late wagnerian collapse of diatonic movement, but hadn't yet settled into anything as rigorous (or shareable) as serialism

one of the reasons serialism got such a lock on the post-war avant-arde was that "atonality" (as owen's more or less defining it) was a grab-bag of personalised and eclectic systems, which didn't have much in common of meaningful significance, which -- in most cases -- no two composers shared... in other words it wasn't a school or a movement; it was a transitional phase

(in fact early schoenberg has to go right into that defn of atonality, and -- i think julio's right -- berg too; yes he was a 12-toner but his area of primary interest was the expressive borderland between tonality and atonality) (and the second vienna school weren't really known as "serialists" until darmstadt generation picked up on webern's approach and pushed it to its limits)

the problem is (at least with hindsight) if you're choosing to particular with a view to being helpful, you surely have to pay mind to a lot of other (similarly unhelpful) names of pseudo-tendencies -- bartok and early stravinsky could just as well be (and often used to be) called "polytonal" rather than "atonal"; and beefheart (who i realise is included here as a fuck-with-yr-head extra) isn't really more "atonal" in this narrow sense than plenty else in the classic blues or free jazz tradition

kontakte is indeed made by tape collage, but this tells us nothing about its sound choices; and (as established at tedious length above), vacuum cleaners needn't just be "found sound" -- it could be operating in a futurist context; in a cage-ian context; in a drone or an electronic improv context

(that's a bit of a from-memory summary, but it's more or less true)

I'm specifically thinking of Bartok, some early Stravinsky, Hindemith, Ligeti, Wychnegradsky, Ustvolskaya, Captain Beefheart. There are chords, there are melodies, and there are cadences, but there is no tonality.

My favourite "atonal" work is Hindemith's Ludus Tonalis, which isn't really deliberately atonal, but rather a re-imagining of the rules of tonality.

-- Owen Pallett (opallet...), January 14th, 2007. (Owen Pallett)

This is a bunch of ignorant nonsense.

Beautiful. Good observations, too.

You're right... whenever I've read about non-serial "atonality" the work was almost always created with an improvised and intuitive harmonic system.

-- A-ron Hubbard (Hurtingchie...), January 14th, 2007."

Describe the ignorance. What does it look like?

Not on the radio, no, but I think that some of Cuneiform's historical circle of influence can be considered "pop music without a tonal center".

I'm specifically thinking of Bartok, some early Stravinsky, Hindemith, Ligeti, Wychnegradsky, Ustvolskaya, Captain Beefheart. There are chords, there are melodies, and there are cadences, but there is no tonality.

The problem with this is that there is no single, established set of "boundaries of harmonic convention," and there never has been. You're setting up a classic false dichotomy of "rules" and "breaking the rules." If anything, each successive generation of composers found its own way of altering and playing with the prior generation's boundaries, and Stravinsky and Bartok were just further steps in that process. And I think there's a Schoenberg quote where he says the same thing about himself - Wagner took tonality as far as it could be taken so the next logical step was to systematically avoid tonality, or something like that.

"Around atonality great battles of theoretical verbiage were fought, the dust and clangor of the warfare rather obscuring than clarifying the truth of the insight... As usual, the argument centred more round terminology than upon what was able to be heard. The longest ears did the least listening."

This is just a fancy-pants way of saying "stop using so many big words and just listen to the music." Classic canard, and a cop-out.

thx guys

schoenberg would often use his tonerows to write hooks & melodies, and sometimes he'd flat out break his own rules to avail himself of traditional harmonies. webern was later lionized as the true atonal progressive because he made more of a radical break with the past, with his works almost every single new note is a surprise, no ground to stand on, no hint of what's coming next -- that's the key to early atonality

also a wee bit unfair to accuse yates of copping out since that passage concludes a great long chapter detailing exactly the arguments pro and con atonality-as-the-way-forward -- he's not actually saying anything terribly different from a-ron's "classic false dichotomy of rules and breaking the rules" (though that's not clear from the way i excerpted it -- which mainly just amused me bcz of the "dust and clangor" of this thread); yates was a fairly early critical champion of cage, who was by the 50s militantly against the idea of the "one set of rules"

still, the idea of a universal set of rules of composition was certainly the will-o-the-wisp that powerfully drove stockhausen and boulez in the early stages of their careers: schoenberg (as lensed thru darmstadt) would have considered a-ron's pluralist eclecticism to be a lamentable cop-out -- as milton p says, webern was lionised as the ultra-rigorous pupil -- the assumption being that the 2nd viennese school above all wanted to establish a universal harmonic (or post-harmonic) language that at once encompassed diatonic harmony and moved beyond it

but of course there were lots of other composers in the 20s and 30s who embraced pluralist eclecticism (maybe not in so many words): and i'm not sure that the darmstadt perspective wasn't a fairly distorting self-serving and-or oedipal re-reading of its own ancestry

To put it differently, the "triadic" definition is talking about the materials used in a piece (major and minor chords). Perhaps you could expand it to talk about music that's modal without necessarily being triadic -- Indian classical music, for example.

The "functional" definition basically assumes the primacy of those materials, i.e. the the minor/major triads; its litmus test is, rather, the relationships between those materials. If those relationships are explored using the techniques that were standard in, say, 1600-1900, then it's called "common-practice tonality". Examples would be the use of a home key or "tonic", the tendency of the dominant seventh chord (G-B-D-F) to resolve to the tonic (C-E-G), and so on. Especially important is the capacity of music to modulate, to change from one home key to another. In some sense this is the most crucial element of common practice and of tonality as a whole -- the idea that we can move from key to key in an intelligible and structurally meaningful way. Tonality creates an immediate hierarchy, defining the relationship between where you are, and where you could go.

It's significant to talk about this because there are a lot of things that are triadic or modal/scalar, but not functionally tonal. One example of this would be music that's quite harmonically static, staying on one chord, one mode, or one harmony for long periods of time. For instance:

- most 20th-century minimalism (Reich, Glass, Riley)
- Stockhausen's "Stimmung"
- Tanzanian mbira music (Hukwe Ubi Zawose, et al.)
- some of Charlemagne Palestine's stuff

On the other hand, we have music that's mostly made up of triads, but that uses those triads in a very unconventional way, in which they don't have the "function" they normally do in Western tonal music. Sometimes this is about the succession/juxtaposition of modes that don't have a clear tonal relationship, as in a lot of jazz ("So What"). At other times, parallel motion becomes a major factor, turning the triad from a functional entity into a sound-in-itself. Debussy is the king of this approach -- his music is almost always triadic (with certain notable exceptions), but the relationships between those triads are often oblique, with no meaningful way to analyze them as I-IV-vi-etc.

Getting back to the original question, "atonal" is a very slippery word because of this double function. I mean, we could use it to describe Debussy, or (to take a very different example) the highly chromatic madrigals of Carlo Gesualdo. Neither of these composers follow the laws of common-practice harmony. But, because their music is fundamentally triadic, the core sonority -- major chord, minor chord -- is essentially the same as Beethoven, Bach, et al., even if its grammar is completely different.

And it wouldn't feel right, either, to call something like Indian classical music "atonal", in part because it was never trying to be tonal, per se: it's modal music, at heart, based on specific scales and the inflection of those scales. The same goes for most non-Western musical traditions, whether they're based on pentatonic scales and "natural" modes -- as is the case for, say, Scottish folk song -- or "synthetic" scales like Arabic maqams, Indian ragas, and so on.

It also feels deceptive to use the word "atonal" to describe stuff like Metal Machine Music or Merzbow. If something has nothing to do with triads, scales, and equal temperament -- if it's not organized in terms of pitch and/or harmony -- then "atonal" isn't really a meaningful way of describing it: it's a mixed metaphor, like saying that a spitball is illegal in hockey. The "rules" it violates are more fundamental than tonality. One could call this music "non-harmonic", though that's also deceptive.

No, I think the best definition of "atonal" is the one that points to Schoenberg et al., and especially the one that points to their post-tonal, pre-12-tone music -- partly because that's how it was used historically, partly because it makes the most sense. It's music in which pitch is structurally significant, but it's not organized around triads or specific scales. In Schoenberg's early atonal music, a particular pitch often becomes a clearly audible focal point -- for instance, the note D in the second of the Five Pieces for Orchestra -- and much of the music of that period still feels quasi-tonal, like it's right on the brink.

Actually, if any one composer embodies all of these things, it's Stravinsky. His earliest music was completely tonal. The Firebird started to use synthetic scales and the like, though its basic grammar was still tonal. Petrushka is considerably further removed, using stuff like polytonality/polychords, extended modal passages, and more octatonic scales. The Rite of Spring is actually surprisingly triadic if you take it apart -- its most characteristic feature, even more so than Petrushka, is the superposition of multiple modes and harmonies. There's little vestige left, however, of functional harmony in the traditional sense.

Later came his neoclassical period, in which the music is at times extremely diatonic, though traditional functional relationships are often obscure at best. The result is a music that uses the building blocks of traditional harmony, but little of its grammar. Is it atonal? Not in the traditional sense, and a lot of the time it doesn't feel all that triadic -- one of the usual descriptors is "pandiatonicism", which accounts for harmonies like B-C-G-F and F-B-D-C. But because it uses diatonic scales, to the typical listener it will feel related to Haydn -- or worse yet, Brahms -- in a way that Schoenberg doesn't. ("Worse yet", meaning much to Arnold's chagrin...)

After Schoenberg died, Stravinsky adopted 12-tone technique, and for the rest of his career became an "atonal" composer in the usual sense. There are still vestiges left of triadic and diatonic structures left, however, and many have remarked on how much Stravinsky's 12-tone music "still sounds like Stravinsky". A great piece to check out in this regard is Agon, which he began right at the end of his neoclassical phase, but completed after his 12-tone "conversion". It's a highly sectional piece, with a lot of short 1- and 2-minute bits, so it lends itself to that kind of episodic treatment; nevertheless, it's remarkable how well the whole thing hangs together, with diatonic music placed side-by-side with completely atonal/12-tone/whatever music.

Whew. Please forgive any oversimplifications.

("TLDR")

As for atonal pop, there are a couple Silver Apples tracks that don't really have a clear tonal center ("You and I" especially), but their use of microtones complicates the issue...

The former is strictly bitonal, and the latter could almost be described as monophonic. It sounds, to my ears anyway, as if he was trying to get away from the dense pantonality of The Rite and into something new.

Does anybody know anything about Messaien and his method?

I mean, outside of the bird-song stuff? And the "I am spelling the name of the Virgin Mary using note names" stuff?

Are you familiar with the modes of limited transposition? Interesting stuff.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzodB0Sp6ZI