Atonal Music: 3 Characteristics of Atonal Music

Atonal music is a style of music that does not adhere to the traditional harmonic concept of a key or mode. Songs and concert pieces that anchor around a major or minor key possess tonality. By contrast, atonality does not make use of the traditional scales and modes found in tonal music. It uses all twelve pitches in the chromatic scale as well as other organizing principles to create musical forms.

After many centuries of tonal music, atonal works began emerging in the avant-garde classical music scene of Vienna in the early twentieth century. The leading voice of atonality in Western music was Arnold Schoenberg, an Austrian composer who led a movement called the Second Viennese School.

• Arnold Schoenberg’s influence: In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Schoenberg produced florid tonal pieces with frequent chromaticism. This made him a contemporary of late Romantic era composers like Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler. Beginning in 1908, Schoenberg began to more openly embrace dissonance, in open defiance of Romantic music theory.
• German connection: Schoenberg saw direct connections between his increasingly atonal music and the works of prior Germanic composers, particularly Bach. Dividing his time between Vienna and Berlin, he believed that through free atonality, he could glorify the Germanic tradition of music-making. Eventually, Schoenberg would have to flee Germany and Austria on account of his Jewish heritage and the rise of the Nazis.
• Protégés: Schoenberg's most notable protégés at the Second Viennese School included Alban Berg and Anton Webern. In some ways, these composers modified Schoenberg's increasingly strident techniques and made the music more palatable to cautious ears. Berg would notably insert fragments of diatonic scales into atonal pieces, particularly in his acclaimed operas Wozzeck and Lulu.
• New computational techniques: Schoenberg developed a method alternately known as serialism or the twelve-tone technique. This composition technique provided structure for composing atonal works (in contrast to free atonality where no organizing rules exist). In serial music, notes split off into tone row and pitch classes. These dictate the order in which notes must appear within the composition. The twelve-tone music technique attracted many followers within the classical music world, such as conductor Pierre Boulez, but the atonal music of the Second Viennese School never broke through with mainstream classical audiences.
• Rivalries: Schoenberg's musical rival was Igor Stravinsky, a Russian star of the Modernist era. Stravinsky notably resisted serialism and atonal music during Schoenberg's lifetime, but following Schoenberg's death, the Russian began composing new music that directly embraced atonal techniques. Following WWII, Stravinsky became one of the leading composers of dodecaphonic (twelve-tone) music.

Other notable composers who wrote atonal pieces include Paul Hindemith, Sergei Prokofiev, Alexander Scriabin, Claude Debussy, Béla Bartók, Pierre Boulez, and Edgard Varèse.

A few characteristics define atonal music, including:

1. 1. No tonal center: Atonal music does not exist in a major key or a minor key. Nor does it follow a mode, such as Dorian or Phrygian modes. No single note feels like the "root" of an atonal piece.
2. 2. Based around the chromatic scale: In Western music, the chromatic scale is a 12-note scale that involves all available pitches played in order. Each interval in the chromatic scale goes up by one half-step. Atonal compositions use all notes in the chromatic scale.
3. 3. Strictly or loosely organized: The strictest form of atonal music composition is Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone serial method, which prescribes a specific tone row of notes that cannot be altered. On the other extreme, free atonality does not have strict compositional rules and extends endless possibilities to a composer.

Within the classical music community, several atonal pieces have become popular, such as.

1. 1. Dreimal sieben Gedichte aus Albert Girauds "Pierrot lunaire" by Arnold Schoenberg: A twenty-one–part musical cycle set to poems by Albert Giraud, this piece comes from Schoenberg's period of free atonality.
2. 2. Erwartung by Schoenberg: A one-act melodrama known for its bristling atonality, numerous tempo and meter changes, and a lack of repeated phrases.
3. 3. Lulu by Alban Berg: A three-act opera that uses a twelve-tone compositional technique. Berg blended true serialism with the emotional tension that defined the popular music of the time period.
4. 4. Variations: Aldous Huxley in memoriam by Igor Stravinsky: Following Schoenberg's 1951 death, Stravinsky turned to serialism in his vocal, orchestral, and piano pieces. This 1964 work was Stravinsky's last major piece.
5. 5. Bagatelle sans tonalité by Franz Liszt: Liszt was a giant of the Romantic era—a period where tonal music prevailed—but some music historians consider Bagatelle sans tonalité, written in 1885, to be the first true embrace of atonality in modern classical music. Others believe that the piece does have a tonal center. Within 25 years of 1885, the Second Viennese School would radically push beyond any nineteenth-century notions of atonality.

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