atonal
/eɪˈtəʊn(ə)l
/ /əˈtəʊn(ə)l/adjective Music
Not written in any key or mode: atonal music may be written by obscuring tonal structures or by ignoring conventional harmonies altogether...
- Not one to experiment in the emerging environment of atonal and neo-classical music, his old-fashioned compositions were swept aside well before his death.
- In fact, it reminds me very much of Schoenberg's freely atonal music of roughly twenty years previous.
- When the lectures were first delivered, Bernstein's rejection of atonal music deeply offended many avant-garde composers.
Derivatives
atonalism
- He would experiment with Schoenberg-style atonalism before embracing tonal and populist elements (especially American jazz).
- It was intellectuals who kept the spotlight on atonalism long after the public got alienated from it.
- Creston explored a variety of musical techniques and compositional styles, including atonalism.
atonalist
- Talman would also have us believe that somehow, serialists and atonalists could bury expression in their music by piling on the mathematical base on which their music was founded.
- The serialists / atonalists wrapped themselves in quasi-mathematical systems at the expense of the subjective, though they insisted that the works were meant to be expressive.
- If a colleague dropped atonal writing, the atonalists saw this as a threatening refusal to validate their own work.
atonality
/ noun ...- Webern makes the move to free atonality at roughly the same time Schoenberg does and with very much the same result: a long creative silence.
- I compared him with his colleague Milhaud, whose deeply biting satire and occasional ventures into atonality took him in other directions, in a worldly sense making his music astringent.
- Around the turn of the century, composers began to experiment with atonality, dissonance and primitive rhythms.