Talk:Music Theory/Atonal

1. I have removed the following section: "Following this, there was a reaction against what was seen as excessive systematisation of music, with a number of composers (foremost among them John Cage and the New York School) choosing to write music (known as 'aleatoric music') containing far greater elements of chance. Following this, in the 1970s musical minimalism (as developed by Steve Reich, Terry Riley and Philip Glass, among others) again attacked serialism (and atonality with it) as being too incomprehensible, suggesting a return to a static form of tonality based on repetition. The last 25 years have, in general, followed the same pattern of 'reaction' and 'counter-reaction': while some composers (such as David Del Tredici) have re-embraced tonality completely, others have moved towards music of ever-increasing complexity and difficulty (most notably Brian Ferneyhough and other New Complexity composers)."

2. Cage's music is not a reaction against atonality, and his contributions/innovations really have nothing to do with this topic. (See below, point 6, right after point 5 "this page is hopelessly confused.")

3. Except for the mention of Del Tredici, the passage above has nothing to do with atonality. If you want to write a history of the reactions against atonality (not serialism), then write about the neo-Romantics (like Del Tredici, but more importantly John Corigliano and John Adams). And quit being so white-centric -- why aren't we writing about atonalists Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman, and the jazz musicians who "reacted" against them? -- this history plays out among African-American composers in countless ways that were actually more widely appreciated by the public.

4. It's true that minimalists rebel against serialism but they don't do it by writing music that is any more tonal or any less atonal-- minimalism generally does nothing more to clarify dissonance/consonance relationships than serialism does. You can write a tonal serial piece, and you can write an atonal minimalist piece. The conflict between serialists/pointillists and minimalists simply has nothing to do with atonality; it is a conflict about the pace at which information unfolds, and the prioritization of one kind of information over another.

5. This page is hopelessly confused.

6. John Cage was not opposed to the systemization of music, and chance operations are not "less systematic" than serial operations; in fact, Cage embraced systems more fully than most serial composers, since he used them as a deliberate and rigorous way of distancing musical outcomes from composer control. That ability to separate the composer from the work was a matter of spiritual importance to Cage, and systematization was a deeply important aspect of it. Both Cage's experimentation with aleatoric processes, and the "total serial"/"integral serial" crowd are examples of high modernism, which in general abandons of historical notions of aesthetics or creative language, and favors empirical and experimental approaches to discovering a kind of musical future; the one is no way a reaction against the other.

7. Serialism as a topic needs to be treated separately from atonality; it is just one technique by which composers ensure some kind of structural unity without privileging one note or another. Berg and Schuller and others have elaborately written "tonal" serial works.

8. Grammar/logic: you cannot "assimilate" a language. In the sense being invoked here, it is an intransitive verb; you don't do it "to" a language or culture -- you just do it as a being and doing involves adaptation and accommodation and compromise as part of its intransitive process. (And when it is a transitive verb--a later sense of the word, I think--it has to be done by a culture TO a people, not the other way around. As in "the U.S. assimilated many immigrant cultures in the 19th century.")

Assimilation is the process of adjusting to a norm, adapting the values (and sometimes the language) of a dominant culture. It implies undermining the power of your native culture. It's a silly verb to associate with the idea of acquiring a comprehension of a language or growing accustomed to it.

'''Some people claim atonal music is not music in the same way some claim abstract art is not art. '''


 * What about music from the movie "Star Wars" (1977) ? That was atonal music. Felix Petrar


 * It is? I've never seen anything about that music being atonal.
 * I agree. As far as I can tell it's quite tonal. Was there a specific piece of music that struck you as being atonal? A.C.
 * Overall, the music is tonal, but if you limit the meaning of tonal to its technical definition- that is, as every note fitting into tonality in a 17th century way - very little music is "tonal" as such. For practicality's sake, the layman term tonality refers to music following key structurs, maintaining the primacy of the V-I, etc. I would consider most film music to be more influenced by romanticism than classical music, and so it is not TECHNICALLY tonal. 68.37.236.200 (talk) 05:02, 25 December 2007 (UTC)