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Atonality explained in 7 minutes

Samuel Andreyev7:12 95.925 Aufrufe veröffentlicht Auf YouTube

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  1. Hi everyone. You often hear the term "atonal" used to describe anything that is difficult, discordant, or otherwise musically painful.
  2. I think it's unfortunate that this term was ever brought into use in the first place... because it's pretty close to meaningless.
  3. Perhaps not surprisingly, this vague term is often used in quite vague ways. So in this short video I'm going to attempt to explain what the term "atonal" is actually meant to describe.
  4. Taken literally, the word "atonal" means having no tones, which on the face of it is an absurd definition. But this is in fact a valid description of certain types of music, where unpitched sounds...
  5. are used as compositional materials. For instance, much of the first part of Helmut Lachenmann's... 1989 2nd string quartet requires the performers to bow directly on the bridge, on the tailpiece...
  6. or on the side of their instruments without producing a definite pitch. [Fragment of Lachenmann's 2nd String Quartet]
  7. An earlier example would be Edgard Varèse's 1931 "Ionisation", which is the first composition... written exclusively for percussion instruments, although there are some pitched sounds...
  8. used at the end of the piece. [Fragment of Varèse's "Ionisation"]
  9. You might say that this is atonal music, since it mostly consists of unpitched sounds. However, in actual usage the term has a different meaning.
  10. Since the term "atonal" is a negative descriptor, if we want to understand it, we first have to define "tonality". So, let's take a minute to try to do that.
  11. The syntax of tonality which started to arise in the early Baroque, and reached its apex during the... Classical and Romantic eras, has three main features.
  12. So first of all, it uses diatonic scales, especially the major and minor modes. Secondly, the seven degrees of these scales, and sometimes their chromatic alterations...
  13. are used to build triadic harmonies, built on a root, a third, a fifth and their extensions. Finally, there is a protocol for the preparation and resolution of dissonance, so that such sonorities...
  14. can be integrated into the harmonic fabric without destroying it. In my view, if these three criteria are not met,
  15. the music cannot be properly described as "tonal" in the classical sense, and indeed... it turns out that this definition of tonality excludes all sorts of music.
  16. Including Medieval and Renaissance music, the modal and folk-inspired music of Bartók, Debussy... and Stravinsky, some late Romantic music, large areas of jazz, not to mention grunge rock, new wave,
  17. ambient music, minimalism and much, much else. But these types of music are not normally thought of... as atonal, so you might ask: What exactly does "atonal" mean?
  18. Technically speaking, atonal music does not observe a goal-oriented hierarchy in the pitches used. It is not diatonic in nature, there is no central pitch around which the composition is organized,
  19. and dissonances require neither preparation nor resolution. It avoids triadic harmony, and there is no notion of functionality.
  20. You'll notice though that this definition is entirely negative, describing the music exclusively in terms of what it is not. And as with any negative definition...
  21. it doesn't really help you to understand the positive attributes of a piece. Is it fast or slow? Is it sparse or busy?
  22. Simple or complicated, soothing or harsh, repetitive or complex? The Canadian painter Greg Curnoe, who is my uncle, and also coincidentally...
  23. a pioneer in the Noise Music genre as the primary instigator of the Nihilist Spasm Band, published an artist's book in 1989 called Blue Book 8, consisting of a long list of things that he is not.
  24. I am not a curator, I am not a pop artist, etc. A sort of negative portrait, the book is a playful indication... of the futility of this sort of exercise, as the list of things that a person is not is obviously almost infinite.
  25. In my view, the only music that can be properly described as atonal is music that thoroughly... and systematically avoids any tone combinations that could cause a semblance of key...
  26. or tonal center to arise, but without any consciously deployed structural principle to replace it. And only the composer's intuition and feeling to guide them through this entirely new frontier.
  27. But even there, assuming adequate technique and musicality on the part of the composer, it isn't as though the music were written at random.
  28. The tones still relate to each other in some manner and have dynamically calibrated degrees of tension, attraction, and repulsion.
  29. [Fragment of Schönberg's Drei Klavierstücke] In terms of more recent times, most music that does not use classical harmony is concerned with more...
  30. than simply avoiding the occurrence of triads. There's usually some kind of harmonic syntax... or principle of construction. That can take many forms. It might be modal, spectral, microtonal...
  31. dodecaphonic, stochastic, polytonal... minimalist, serial, or just about anything else. So it strikes me as odd...
  32. that well over a hundred years after the first atonal compositions appeared, there is still in some countries... and France is not least among them,
  33. heated debate amongst composers as to whether it is better to write... progressive, avant-garde music that eschews tonality,
  34. or reasonable, user-friendly, sensible music that adheres to classical harmonic principles. In reality, this is a false dichotomy because it pertains only to a situation...
  35. that existed very briefly in the early part of the 20th century. The fact is, the vast majority of music is made with tones...
  36. and there is usually some sort of technical or aesthetic principle that determines... how these tones will be combined.
  37. The tones of the Western chromatic scale are derived from the harmonic series, and there are many ways... to organize them in a composition. And one last point: the term "atonal" pertains exclusively...
  38. to harmony, but harmony is only one of the parameters of music. Anglophone musicologists are often obsessed with analyzing pitch structures in music...
  39. sometimes to the extent of ignoring gesture, texture, rhythm, rhetoric, timbre, and everything else. But the more you move through the music of the 20th and 21st centuries, the more impossible it becomes...
  40. to consider pitch as an abstract entity, divorced from timbre, duration and dynamics. Today, in the 21st century, all of these parameters function together as an indivisible unit.
  41. And that seems to be the case pretty much across the board, whether you're talking about composition... or a new pop song. So please, let's try to find some new adjective to describe the music you don't like.
  42. If you like this channel, support it. Your help allows me to keep on making high-quality music education videos... available to anyone around the world who wants to watch them, at any time, for free.
  43. Check out the rewards for varying levels of support at www.patreon.com/samuelandreyev . Thanks for watching!

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