Twelve-tone/atonal music

[Chiaroscuro]

Stravinski, Webern, Schoenberg, and Bartok are some of the most well-known pioneers of this type of music (well, some would argue that Bartok doesn't really count, since he employed folk songs in many of his pieces, but anyway). But can it be considered true music? Or rather, to be more explicit, can it be considered music written for the sake bringing some emotion to the listener, not purely mathematical experiments? Particularly twelve-tone music, which is required to use all twelve pitches before repeating any of them and is open to almost unlimited permutations (inversions, reversals, etc.).
Should music be written for how it sounds, even? People threw fruit and shouted at Stravinski's orchestra when the Rite of Spring premiered, but today it is regarded as one of the finest ballets ever written.
Personally, while I appreciate the complexity and the work that goes into writing atonal music, I derive no pleasure from hearing it. It is possible, however, that this is simply because I was raised listening to very tonal music in my early childhood.
Or is twelve-tone music impossible for the human ear to comprehend? It has been shown that abstract art and music is more disturbing to psychiatric patients than more conventional works, but again, it may just be that their brains associated tonal music with familiar and comforting memories.
PS: I apologise for pretty much using the phrases "atonal" and "twelve-tone" indiscriminately, but it is hard to find a consistent definition of "atonality."

[kheegster]

Atonal music does arouse emotion in me, to be specific: boredom and disgust.

Stravinsky may have been radical when he wrote the Rite of Spring, but it was still basically tonal and has a discernable melodic component.

[Shinova]

There's a lot of people who rave on and on about how mathematical music is and there are people like that who write music that explores and focuses on said supposed mathematicality.



I think, so what? It sounds shit to listen to.

[Metatwaddle]

There's a lot of people who rave on and on about how mathematical music is and there are people like that who write music that explores and focuses on said supposed mathematicality.

I think, so what? It sounds shit to listen to.

I agree with you. Also, as I understand Bach's music is fairly mathematical itself (maybe not so mathematically complex, but it's not bad in terms of mathematics), and at least that actually sounds good. The inversions and reversals are all there, plus it's tonal and pleasing to the ear.

I've never really been a fan of atonal music, though I attribute that partly to my piano teacher for nine years, who really influenced the way I think about music. (She disliked overly experimental 20th-century music and had a particular disdain for John Cage. She loved the Romantic era - the golden age of piano music, IMHO.) I don't think I'd really have liked it anyway, though. Some of it is okay, but after a while a lot of wandering music with no real home base, no identifiable tonic or dominant tones, just sort of bores and repels me. And yes, I do think that good music expresses emotion, and the best music evokes emotion as well. Atonal music has never done that for me.

[Shinova]

Yeah. As I understand it, among older and more famous classical music Bach's is probably the more "logical" of the bunch, in comparison to someone like Beethoven, who's music was all about emotion.

But yes, Bach's music at least sounds nice to listen to. Unlike, say Schoenberg, who I think is the one who invented the twelve tone system.



There is one merit to that kind of atonal music though, and that is that their creators are trying to do something completely different with music.

Trying to break new ground has good merits..... unfortunately the results are typically not very pretty.

[Kuroneko]

Much of it is not even mathematically interesting--the twelve-tone technique is to music what numerology is to mathematics. There is already some interesting structure behind music written by musicians that didn't concern themselves with mathematics. Some of the more famous examples include the Möbius strip in Bach's Musical Offerings and the torus in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. The latter is especially interesting, although incomplete (it's a sequence of 19 chords in the second movement; the pattern is obvious on a torus and can be extended to all 24 triads). I would think doing music on a torus or a Möbius strip is much more mathematically interesting than making sure all the tones add up before repeating.

[Chiaroscuro]

I agree with most of you that atonal music is unpleasant to the ear. However, the possibility still remains: if we had grown up listening to it, is it possible that we would like it? Or is there some function of our reptilian brain that makes us like tonality? It's true that most animals seem to prefer tonality over atonality... but this could also be because many atonal pieces use loud, jarring, and/or high-pitched sounds, like Schuller's "Reminiscences and Reflections."
Most people from the West who listen to classical music from India, for example, don't find it particularly pleasant; their "scales" are completely different from ours. Likewise, most people from India find Western music very strange and complicated, since they don't use harmonies (as we would define them). Classical Japanese singing has been compared to the shrieking of cats by Westerners, but to the Japanese it is beautiful and intensely moving. One could go on, of course.
Personally, I am of the opinion that music should be written for how it sounds. If you just use mathematical equations to figure it out, it becomes simply an exercise for one's own benefit, not something other people will necessarily want to hear.
But it is possible that for some people, writing music for how it sounds would be beautiful to them, but atonal or random-sounding to us.