Atonement.

May 30, 2006 7:10 PM

Neighbors driving you nuts blasting the latest Kathleen Turner Overdrive or Debussy? Fight back with the complete Pierrot Lunaire! Impress your friends by leaving a copy of the manuscript* printed on artificially aged paper out on your coffee table!** Defy your friends! Confound your enemies! Bestride your ancestors! And, best of all, tell Bach to shove his clavier up his well-tempered ass!†

* in German, obviously; babelfish
** coffee table not included
† more is inside!
posted by Eideteker (32 comments total)

Pierrot Lunaire, along with Godard's Pierrot le Fou, inspired the title of an episode of Cowboy Bebop, scored largely with atonal music. Pierrot Lunaire has been mentioned before on MeFi. Some links via wikipedia's External links section on the PL article.

I'm interested to learn more about atonality myself. Please share your atonal music, knowledge, and experiences.
posted by Eideteker at 7:11 PM on May 30, 2006

translated page
posted by trinarian at 7:22 PM on May 30, 2006

How long will google cache a translated page? I was hesitant to put a translated link in the FPP itself for fear it would expire.
posted by Eideteker at 7:24 PM on May 30, 2006

the link seems more a command to execute the translation program than something in Google's cache... i could well be wrong.
posted by trinarian at 7:26 PM on May 30, 2006

I have a theory that no one else is going to like this post other than me. :-D

1. A reporter once asked Schönberg if he thought tonality was finished. "Not at all: there are many great pieces not yet written in the key of C." (Paraphrased -- I couldn't find the reference.) I always suspected that Riley named his "In C" as a reference to this but I've never found a reference.

2. Atonality led to dodecaphony (or twelve-tone music), the apex of which is in my opinion Alban Berg's thrilling opera "Lulu". Space and time do not permit me to do this justice, but the opera is structured so that Lulu meets three men on her way up who she destroys: the last one she murders and goes to jail as a result. There is a brief film (in the opera) of her going to jail and coming out that's the same forwards as backwards; the second half of the opera is the reverse of the first half, as she meets three different men (played by the same actors in reverse order) who bring her down, the last one ("Jack") murdering her (she dies horribly on a high C) and then walks out saying, "That was a nasty bit of business! Damn, there's never a towel around when you need one."

3. When Frank Zappa was 13, he talked to the famous atonal/avant-garde composer Edgard Varese. I can't improve on Zappa's own description. (A reporter once referred to Varese's music as "experimental" in front of him. He bristled: "I do all my experimentation *before* I present it to an audience.")
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 7:34 PM on May 30, 2006

There's also an excellent Italian band called Pierrot Lunaire.
posted by kenko at 7:54 PM on May 30, 2006

I love me some atonal music. Check out anything that the amazing (and local) Stuart Dempster has commisioned and/or performed, including Berio's Sequenza V for solo trombone.

Excellent stuff! A music history class that I'm taking actually covered these very things this morning in lecture.
posted by rossination at 8:04 PM on May 30, 2006

Thanks for the post. Seems like A.S. has some of the best friends on the web (or at least the most tech savvy.) Through your links I came to the ACS Orpheus Alliance which offers more "animations" (scores timed with the music in flash) as well as audio, music theory, and "teaching objects." Many of the links are dead, but others are nicely done (beware of some of the harmonic analyses, however.)

Like this Debussy: pretty to look at, but some of the chords are just wrong.

..although it proves I'm a total snob.
posted by imposster at 8:42 PM on May 30, 2006

Fight back with the complete Pierrot Lunaire!

Its a good thing people grow up. I was once that guy blasting Pierrot Lunaire from the rooftop speakers on my loft in Providence. You know, because I was cooler than anyone who would dare to complain.

personally I find Webern's tiny pieces much more listenable than other serialists.

Schoenbergs opus 24 is heavily influenced by Frank Zappa. Someone had a nice bunch of Schoenberg mp3s linked on MeFi some time back.
posted by StickyCarpet at 8:44 PM on May 30, 2006

Schoenbergs opus 24 is heavily influenced by Frank Zappa.

Um … What?
posted by kenko at 9:08 PM on May 30, 2006

Just made "Mondestrunken" my ringtone. Thanks for this.
posted by QuietDesperation at 9:43 PM on May 30, 2006

I have a theory that no one else is going to like this post other than me. :-D

You're going to have to discard that theory, I think. Great post, Eideteker.
posted by LeeJay at 9:58 PM on May 30, 2006

Hey now. What's with the Bach-hatin'?

You don't need to throw Bach out to dig Schoenberg, who saw the "emancipation of the dissonance" as part of a logical progression of greater chromaticism that Bach helped drive, if not kick off, with his Well-Tempered ass Clavier.

While I applaud Schoenberg's initiative in seeking the furthest point to which chromaticism could be pushed, I've never really been able to get into Pierrot, nor much Schoenberg past Verklarte Nacht. I can enjoy it intellectually, and even find some parts quite enjoyable to listen to, but I don't find myself wanting to put it on and hear it again. As with StickyCarpet, I find Webern to be the most listenable exemplar of this style, maybe just because the pieces tend to be nice and short.

Still, atonality has an obvious place as the liberated "anarchy" of musical keys; what I find ridiculous is the serialism of the 50s, where the (sorely missed) organizing principle of keyed tonality was replaced by arbitrary, non-intelligible (to listeners) systems, where tone rows got mapped into matrixes and evey aspect of sound was constrained according to mathematical considerations that other serialists could follow and be impressed by. To me the whole era seems like one big wank-fest.

One interesting thing about Strauss' Also Sprach Zarathustra is how he parodies that very era some fifty years in advance in the "Science" section, deriving a fugue theme which, but for one or two repeated notes, would be the first 12-tone "row" ever, standing for science's (and scientists') arch and overly analytical tendencies. Strauss was an arrogant show-off, I'll grant you, but his music is rich with humor, which is something I find missing from most atonal (and especially serial) music.
posted by soyjoy at 10:42 PM on May 30, 2006

I suspect there are many more Pierrot Lunaire fans out there than one might expect. I remember a performance someone put together for his senior recital--each player made his/her own flyer, and they said something like:

"Come hear soprano XX frighten the audience in...Arnold Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire!!"

Etc....my favorite was: "Come hear XX play the shit out of the bass clarinet in...Arnold Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire!!"

It was a great recital, too. What a magnificent piece. I just finished teaching my spring semester instrumental music literature class, and the last listening CD starts with Schoenberg, and moves through the 20th century to the present. (Well, not exactly in chronological order--the "traditionalists" were covered previously, as they connect more directly to their late 19th c. predecessors...this CD covered the 2nd Viennese School, Stravinsky, Ives, other modernists, and then proceeded chronologically from the post WWII avant-garde forward.)

Without fail, this is always the most difficult part of the class--my students, who are all upper-level music majors, have a very difficult time divorcing their ability to understand and evaluate music from their expectations and prejudices that years of education rooted in late-18th & 19th c. music have solidly implanted. They really feel physical frustration waiting for some sort of harmonic resolution or vertical organization of pitch into consonance. And I think that they share this with non-musician listeners (i.e., most of the rest of everyone).

Here's this musician's take on atonality: there has been some extraordinary, and extraordinarily beautiful, music written within the broad idiom that the term 'atonal' represents. However: disassembling tonality (either intuitively or systematically) abstracts an already inherently abstract art form. This confuses listeners.

Music is already a completely abstract medium--there's no physical there there to apprehend. Tonality (western diatonic common practice tonality, to be specific) is a ubiquitous and easily recognized & understood way of organizing sound. Harmonic tension and release is derived from the ways sound works in nature, and is recognized by most listeners intuitively, without any education, explanation, or really any previous experience.

So when, to compare, painters moved to the abstract, away from a representational language rooted in actual objects presented in realistic, recognizable ways, it was an abstraction of one degree (as in Magritte's famous assertion Ceci n'est pas une pipe). When Schoenberg (for instance) moved tones away from the fundamental organizing principles of tonality, it was a second degree of abstraction. And that sounds weird and foreign to people, which makes them uncomfortable.

It takes some patience and attention to learn how to hear atonal music, for its beauty and elegance to reveal itself. Nearly all listeners are not willing to put in that time and effort, thus Pierrot Lunaire's (and atonality's in general) weak blip on the larger cultural perception.

On preview, ditto much of what soyjoy said. Though I would also add that Schoenberg returned to tonality later in life, as in his delightful second chamber symphony.
posted by LooseFilter at 11:16 PM on May 30, 2006 [2 favorites]

Fantastic comments everyone! I always regretted not taking any music classes past Beginning Composition.

Eideteker, do you know of the Japanese band Pierrot? Do you think they got their name from Pierrot Lunaire?
posted by halonine at 11:51 PM on May 30, 2006

Loosefilter: I'm not sure I follow you about Magritte. His painting is surreal rather than abstract (in the expressionist sense I was expecting you to talk about). And 'The Use of Words I' is all about saying how regular representational painting is already one step removed from reality.


Secondly, although the idea about atonal and 12 tone music being a second step removed is interesting I don't think you'd have to take that view. If you had only ever heard atonal or 12 tone music then regular tonal music might strike you as 'more' abstract. Atonal music just seems less goal orientated, and more about enjoying the colours and textures of the sound combinations, i.e. similar to appreciating natural phenomenon like the sky. So why can't this way of understanding be more fundamental and the addition of tonal goals be a further abstraction? You might say that by doing this, tonal music comes closer to human experience, but then you could say the same thing about abstract expressionist painting. Maybe atonal music captures basic sensation where tonal music captures our more conventionalised ideas of narrative emotions?

Take another example: Do you consider Gamelan music to be more or less abstract than Western tonal music?
posted by leibniz at 2:01 AM on May 31, 2006

Pierrot was the first Schoenberg I heard; I wouldn't say it's near the top of my favorites now, and it doesn't quite shock the way it did at first, but it still represents a marvel of imagination.

I don't think tonality or lack of it is nearly as big a difficulty in understanding or enjoying Schoenberg as his characteristic lack of repetition.

On the large scale, scarcely any one of his works sounds like any other one, so it can be very difficult to feel like you know "what Schoenberg sounds like." Or to put it another way, it's easy to hear one piece that you don't like, give up, and miss out on some radically different pieces.

It's more the lack of repetition and lack of structural cues inside a work that makes A.S. difficult, though. Big 'c' Classical music is about architecture and structure as much as tonality - each one determines the other - and every tonal move a skilled classical composer writes has a lot of structural cues to help the listener follow the argument, or the development, or perhaps the best thing to say is to follow the drama.

Schoenberg can not tolerate a literal repeat (there is a little repetition without any variation in the Dance Scene of the Op 24 serenade and I can't think of any other instances in a mature work) and he also doesn't have any patience for reinforcing his argument - with Schoenberg it's just a straight ahead dash, and the words "process of continual (or continuous) variation" that often crop up in this context are quite accurate. The thing is that "continuous variation" is one of those things that may sound better on paper than in practice. It demands tremendous imagination and skill to write in such a mode, but the effect on the listener can be nothing more than confusion, and that's not necessarily to say that the listener is incompetent or "not a good listener". It can be, at worst, like listening to grade-school kid telling a story: "okseefirstthishappenohIforgottotellyouaboutthisonetimeandthenIwentoverandthethingcameoutand...."
That's just bad story-telling, and I think Schoenberg is sometimes guilty of the musical equivalent. Rarely, actually, but it's a danger that his style is perpetually flirting with. Besides being hard to follow while it happens, the continual variation is a sort of democatrization of ideas - which is a very Schoenbergian thing to say - that means it's very difficult for any one idea to stand out as important, and memorable. I've listened to and pored over a fair amount of Schoenberg, and the best I could do off the top of my head is a few bars from the opening of Pierrot (I don't listen that one so often, but it does kind of stick), the beginning of the D Major quartet, the first few bars of the violin concerto which are unusually memorable.

That democratization of pitch that is the main feature of the 12-tone technique is another thing that sounds better on paper. First it should be said that the 12-tone technique is entirely for the composer, not the listener; there are certainly studies (can I cite? Not off the top of my head) to show that even experienced musicians can't tell by listening if a piece is written in the 12-tone technique or not, and we have correspondence of Schoenberg to - I can't remember whom - on the subject of his violin concerto. The other correspondent had worked out what the tone row was that Schoenberg used in the work - that's not always a trivial thing to do even if you have the score to look at - and Schoenberg replied to the effect of, "Oh, I'm surprised you bothered; I'm sure it wasn't worth the effort." This is not Schoenberg being self-effacing (that's a pretty funny notion); he's sincere in meaning that it's not worth trying to 'decompile' one of his works to figure out how it was made; he'd rather you just listen it as it is. In any event, you can see again that the 12-tone technique has some features that seem inherently incompatible with drama - there is no way to establish anything different, or any new region, when everything is democratically equal. That last clause is not a complete description of 12-tone theory by any means, but at least as far as pitch-classes go it is accurate. It means that nothing like the large, meaningful key regions of the classicists is possible. And again, it makes it quite difficult for the listener to store a blueprint of the work in his memory; difficult for anyone to leave a longer Schoenberg piece with any more impression than "some things happened". "What was the main idea of the work?" "I'm not sure, but some things certainly happened."

Atonality, whether 12-tone, or serialized in other ways, or freer, is badly in need of someone who can decipher logical, convincing formal consequences of their atonal ideas. Note the word "convincing" there. There's a surplus of people with theories on the matter, but listen, for instance, to Boulez's piano sonatas. Or don't. That might be one of the options he intended, anyway. Schoenberg was not great at large scale architecture - he is mostly about local effect - and moves like transposing the main tone row down a 5th in the first movement of the violin concerto to roughly mimic a sonata form really kind of point that up. (I love the violin concerto, incidentally, and would place it right near the top of his most successful mature works. But even at the very best, then, Schoenberg just did not have great large-scale ideas.) There are to my mind three plausible conclusions - one is that Schoenberg, with his deep reverence for many of his classical predecessors, chose to retain older forms for his new ideas in order to maintain some continuity with the past. A less charitable view is that he was just not capable of figuring out what was needed, and fell back on the old forms to get him through to the end of the piece. The bleakest view possible is that atonality doesn't lead to satisfying large-scale forms, and is inherently limited in its scope for expansion and development. I think Berg refutes this a little; the violin concerto certainly feels it's the right size (but note the close ties to tonality and the still fairly loose, first-this-happens-then-this-happens structure), and Wozzeck is a masterpiece of structure and organization (though it's always easier to articulate drama when you have the human voice available. Schoenberg's own Moses and Aron is certainly his greatest success as a dramatist. At least outside of Pierrot, which, if I recall, was where we began here.) Composers like Martin and Rochberg make a wonderful case for the purely local use of atonality as a particular color or effect in parts of a work. (Rochberg was at one point strict serialist, and one of the most successful at writing listenable music in that style - but... well, read this). Bartók is essentially atonal in his 3rd quartet and he is the quintessence of effective large-scale organization. But his sort of atonality is more characterized by "lack of functional harmony", and does not preclude points of stability and large areas commanded by a single pitch.

Moses and Aron, a final note, is one place in Schoenberg you'll find a sustained piece of stable harmony (right in the opening scene); Schoenberg tends ordinarily to be obsessed with filling every space with something new and chasing off after every direction an unstable chord might lead (to another unstable chord and so on, rather breathlessly). His impatience with stability turns into something wonderful in his orchestrations' of older works (Bach, Handel, Brahms, Monn); he absolutely was a great orchestrator and having his whirling, kaleidoscopic colors imposed upon works more harmonically patient than his own is nothing short of wondrous.

I find the man and the music fascinating, and am always compelled to ask myself if the things I count as flaws - intriguing, interesting flaws, to be sure - in Schoenberg might not actually be flaws in my own expectations.
posted by Wolfdog at 4:08 AM on May 31, 2006 [3 favorites]

I didn't say half of what I wanted to say, either.
posted by Wolfdog at 4:08 AM on May 31, 2006

For instance, I wanted to say what an interesting project it would be to take the super-compressed first chamber symphony and rewrite it an a hypothetical, uncompressed multimovement form in which the themes are presented and developed in a more classical way, with transitions, and careful structural articulations, rather than simply rushing through them. You could write an intermediate work, too, in a single movement something like Sibelius's 7th symphony, but a fair measure longer. Schoenberg would resent you doing it, but I believe the results would be fantastic.
posted by Wolfdog at 4:25 AM on May 31, 2006

"What's with the Bach-hatin'?"

Sorry, I just couldn't resist that line. Great comments, everyone! Feel free to go on, Wolfdog.

I have recently awakened a love for Gamelan music, leibniz. I was going to post an FPP on it a few months back, but moonbird beat me to it.
posted by Eideteker at 5:31 AM on May 31, 2006

Very cool.

Pi-rooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!
posted by bardic at 6:33 AM on May 31, 2006

That schoenberg.at site has some free tunes (as previously mentioned, though it looks like the link has changed). Pierrot Lunaire is under chamber music. The links are to .pls playlist files for 128 kbps stereo MP3s.
posted by exogenous at 7:09 AM on May 31, 2006

Loosefilter, I appreciate your comments while wholeheartedly disagreeing with you. I assume you teach a conservatory style music program; it would be rather unusual for a music major to not encounter the "concert" music of the twentieth century until she was an upperclassmen these days.

Encountering dodecaphony or Schoenberg's (as he termed it) pan-tonal music is often difficult for many people at first, but this is due to lack of exposure to these types of sounds, in my opinion. Using the harmonic series "present in nature" to explain the superiority of diatonic harmony is absurd, and was often used in the 19th century by Romantics justifying their need to believe that their music stemmed from Geist. This harmonic series is present in nature as an abstraction; very few natural sounds feature harmonic partials as the most prominent parts of their spectra.

Describing degrees of abstraction in the way you did earlier really gives pride of place to diatonic harmony. It assumes that the abstraction present in musical practice is from pure sound to triadic harmony. If this is based merely on the harmonic series thing again, it starts to fall apart for me. What I would consider a second degree of abstraction would be the subtleties of written music that don't necessarily correspond to sound experience, e.g. Wagner or Webern. We find all sorts of cleverness there upon reading the score, but we don't really hear it.
posted by nonreflectiveobject at 9:00 AM on May 31, 2006

Wouldn't that sequence in the final movement of Beethoven's 9th Symphony count as the first tone row? It's the one that bounces from note to note, hitting eleven of the twelve notes while carefully avoiding the A until the chorus hits it with "Brüder!"
posted by ancientgower at 9:27 AM on May 31, 2006

This harmonic series is present in nature as an abstraction; very few natural sounds feature harmonic partials as the most prominent parts of their spectra.

That may be true "in nature", but the harmonic series is an essential fact of all the orchestral instruments except the percussion. And the overtone series of an instrument is correspondingly essential in determining what intervals, scales, and chords will sound in-tune, consonant, or disonant on that instrument - moreso than you might believe unless you have the opportunity to experiment with scales and overtone series independently. See this previous comment and also if you feel like some technical reading see Dave Benson's work on this.

...this is due to lack of exposure to these types of sounds, in my opinion.
Granted this is only my opinion, but I rather think it's due to the presence of features in the music that actively work against memory and performance, not lack of exposure. You can quickly come to the point where the sounds aren't "shocking" anymore, but you have to be a hell of a well-trained vocalist - and that's still no guarantee - to be able to sing a 12-tone melody, or remember even any fragment of a 12-tone work after it is finished, and the reason most of the works we're talking about here have never been embraced by large audiences is that they can't take part in the work in any way expect passively hearing it or (and how many people are going to take this step?) looking at the score. The music is ephemeral, not something you can carry with you easily, relive, and build a relation with, adding your own personal connotations as pieces of the music coincide with pieces of your life and experiences. That's not to say it's not pleasant while it lasts, and certainly not to say it doesn't contain ingenious workmanship, but the word "forgettable" is always dancing around a discussion like this.

I think we need some musically unprejudiced, young schoolchildren to experiment on.

(On preview: gower, you can find sequences containing all 12 tones in nearly-row form in Mozart and Bach as well, and most certainly others. It's the sort of thing that occurs a possibility to anyone who spends enough time looking at a keyboard or staff paper. The special thing about Schoenberg is systematic use of it, not sporadic appearance of it.)
posted by Wolfdog at 9:50 AM on May 31, 2006

Continued great comments, all. Wolfdog, ditto to all you mention. I absolutely agree, as Richard Crawford said over and over again in every musicology class I had with him, 'Form is key to a meaningful musical experience,' meaning the listeners' perception of form. This is, after all, why the exposition is repeated in sonata-allegro form--so that the material is clear before it is developed. (Plug for a great book: Crawford's fantastic history of American music.)

leibniz, the connection to painters was a brief, not-to-be-too-deeply-considered parallel--what I meant was that painters through that period were trying to (re)claim a visual language that was not only not representational of reality in any direct way, but that emancipated objects from viewers' associations with them. Thus Magritte's admonition that a painting of a pipe is not a pipe, but a painting. They were also trying to explore the different kinds of things that visual art could be about, like internal states of being, etc.

Composers (some) through this period, like Schoenberg, were searching for new means as well. The 'emancipation of dissonance' is primarily about deconstructing the tonal harmonic context of pitch organization, toward the goal of a more directly expressive pitch language. I could imagine that, in a hypothetical world, tertian harmony would be the second level of abstraction--but in practice, that's the common grammar and syntax of musical construction, and it permeates many cultures to the extent that one can't get away from the practical reality that it is the system of organization that makes the most sense to people of those cultures, intuitively (I know of no one who's only ever heard atonal music). And, tonality is in fact based upon the ways sound operates in nature (as Wolfdog clarified), ratios and proportion as well as the overtone series--but that's a whole different conversation.

nonreflectiveobject, I was a little unclear I suppose, due to attempts at concision--my students certainly have had plenty of experience with 20th century concert music prior to this particular course (I teach at a university). I didn't say it was their first experience, simply that, without fail, students who have a whole wealth of experience and training in the art form struggle with this music; I can only imagine what it's like for a "lay" listener. And it seems that, in class and in rehearsal, students' main struggle is conceptual--as Wolfdog comments very astutely upon. They don't know how to hear this music, because the structure, grammar, and syntax are all unfamiliar and/or unclear to them. It takes a bit of focused effort to begin to perceive the order in any system of organization different than the vernacular, in my experience.

FWIW, this is exactly what the American minimalists were dispensing with. If you've not read it, I highly recommend Steve Reich's essay "Music as a Gradual Process":

The use of hidden structural devices in music never appealed to me. Even when all the cards are on the table and everyone hears what is gradually happening in a musical process, there are still enough mysteries to satisfy all.

I suspect Mozart would agree. Also, you wrote:

Describing degrees of abstraction in the way you did earlier really gives pride of place to diatonic harmony. It assumes that the abstraction present in musical practice is from pure sound to triadic harmony.

I should be clear that I am not attempting to give pride of place to anything--history does that already, I think. My point is that the fundamental abstraction in music is not from pure sound to triadic harmony, but rather is inherent in the medium itself: sound is abstract, it has no apprehensible physical reality other than in the moment of sounding; otherwise, it only exists in memory and/or imagination. Therefore, when one's creative medium is sound, you're already working in the abstract. To take a commonly recognized syntax or grammar and rebuild it is to create a second level of abstraction, in my view.
posted by LooseFilter at 10:36 AM on May 31, 2006

Great discussion. There's tons of things I'd like to reply to, but just a few tidbits as I don't have all that much time.

Just to defend my boy Richard Strauss, yes there had been plenty of occurrences of near-tone rows in different chromatically oriented sections of previous music, but the point was that Strauss was consciously constructing this as a "scientific" theme, and then goes forward with it, taking the theme apart and putting it back together in different ways, as you would a tone row (though of course he's working within a conventional harmonic framework).

The harmonic series is an especially fraught issue. While it's true that "nature's" music, such as birdsong, rarely uses diatonic intervals, it's hard to escape the fact that the harmonic series is a natural acoustic phenomenon deriving from the simplest divisions of a string, a column of air, etc. I was very resistant to this back in the day because I came to it through Schenker, who used the "natural" argument to prove that Western music was inherently superior to the musics of "inferior" races. But while I still don't buy that extrapolation I think it's just as off-base to ignore the built-in narrative power that the pull between the one and the five gives to traditional music, and probably makes it easier to follow, all other things being equal.

And as for Steve Reich, "What I'm interested in is a compositional process and a sounding music that are one and the same thing" is quoted in the liner notes to his Four Organs, which stands as a great example of the latter - a piece where there is nothing happening that isn't completely evident (as you might expect, what's happening is a group of notes going out of phase). By the end of the piece the level of musical anarchy easily equals that which Schoenberg was attempting by freeing tonality, but it still seems familiar because it began as a complex chord leaning into a recognizable tonality, and only fell into entropy by tiny degrees. To me, this effect on the listener is more exciting an artistic development than the more abstract one of rejecting tonality - though of course we could say that it was Schoenberg that made Reich possible (he certainly made Terry Riley possible, as lupus_yonderboy pointed out).
posted by soyjoy at 1:05 PM on May 31, 2006

To me, this effect on the listener is more exciting an artistic development than the more abstract one of rejecting tonality

Word.
posted by LooseFilter at 2:48 PM on May 31, 2006

Please pardon my multiple comments, but I keep thinking about this—it’s important to remember that Schoenberg himself was never, in the strict sense, a serialist. He initially tried to compose music that was “freely” atonal (without a system), but found he kept implying harmonic relationships whether he wanted to or not. So he developed the idea of the tone row as a way to formally democratize his choice of pitches (after all, if you dispense with one grammar, you have to develop another to at least some degree).

Serializing pitch in this manner is distinct from the various approaches to Serialism that evolved from this, developments for which his pupil Webern, who was among the first to serialize multiple elements of a composition, was a much more significant catalyst. Though AS serialized pitch (for a while, anyway), he was not a serialist.

The resulting manifestations of serialism made the fatal error, in my view, of fetishizing the object of music, rather than the experience of the sound itself. Which is ironic, considering that Schoenberg was a self-identified Expressionist—his ideas, intended to liberate, shackled musical creativity in many quarters with a burdensome dogma for decades.* A dogma that, thankfully, is mostly cast off (finally).

*(As to just how it became dogma is another interesting question—certainly not through audience demand. It’s my pet theory (and I say this as a member of this particular club) that academia used serialism—and other like-minded intellectually-oriented art-object-fetishizing “movements”—to muscle its way into the center of creative life and cultural discourse. This, of course, has its obvious pros and cons.)
posted by LooseFilter at 5:31 PM on May 31, 2006

Sorry I came back to this late.

I'm a huge fan of gamelan music but I would definitely consider it "less atonal" than twelve-tone music.

I think I should edit more :-D so I'll simply say that many of the twentieth century techniques like dodecaphony, serialism and the like are abstract techniques that do not necessarily translate into sound.

In other words, the structures look good on paper but in a lot of cases sound like "psycho music" (as a friend of mine called it when I was trying to turn him on to it).

You might be able to argue that gamelan is in fact "more tonal" than Western music as there are fewer tones and more significance to each one. (or not...)
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 5:51 PM on May 31, 2006

I don't think it takes much effort to argue gamelan is more tonal. Javanese is, certainly, in the strictest sense - but even in Balinese there are repeated diatonic-inflected pitch patterns that establish some sort of "Do" (even if "Mi" and "Sol" are somewhat off).
posted by soyjoy at 10:47 PM on May 31, 2006

Great comments, all. Flagged several as fantastic.

I too have often wondered how someone would hear music if they had been raised in an atonal environment.

In any event, you can see again that the 12-tone technique has some features that seem inherently incompatible with drama - there is no way to establish anything different, or any new region, when everything is democratically equal.

This is basically my feeling about it. At a very general listening level, 12-tone music seems to me to have a rather limited palette, which seems sort of paradoxical; but whereas different types of tonal music, by virtue of its relational organization, can seem to evoke many different atmospheres and emotions, to me 12-tone music all seems to have roughly the same character.
posted by ludwig_van at 5:27 AM on June 1, 2006