Atonality and

Arnold
Schoenberg
By Jorge S. Mancilla 5/24/2022
What is atonal music?
● By definition, atonal means having no tones.
● Tonality has three main features:
1. It has diatonic scales.
2. The degrees of this scales are used to build harmonies.
3. There is both a preparation resolution to dissonance.
● Atonal music avoids tone combinations that could resemble a key or any tonal
center, and relies on intuition.
How is atonal music different from tonal music?
● Atonal music is not diatonic.
● Avoids triadic harmonies.
● No essential pitches.
● Dissonances can occur whenever.
● No notion of functionality.
An appropriate term for the music composed in this style?

Atonal seems like a negative description, but the music is not written at random,
there is still some relations between tones. The term “Atonal” pertains to only
harmony, but there is many elements of music. In the modern era, all of these
elements are considered all complementary to one another.
Where is Schoenberg from?
● Schoenberg was born on September 13th 1874 in
Vienna, city of music.
● He was born to a shopkeeper and a piano teacher.
● Born in a “Jewish ghetto”.
What was Schoenberg's "radical" idea about "innovating within a tradition?"

● Schoenberg is both a radicalist and conservative. His primary goal was

ensuring the continuation of traditional European music.
● He believed traditions would become hollow if there was not innovation.
● He also believed that artists had to make their art unique and their own.
Instead of using the traditonal key signature/tonal concepts, what was Schoenberg's idea about dissonance?

● He was a pioneer of atonality, and refused to write according to a key

signature.
● He did not follow any grammar or rules for dissonance.
Why was the composition 'Pierrot Lunaire" significant?
● 30+ minutes piece without any key signature.
● Wrote a conservative book all about harmony at the same
time!
● Revolutionary and disruptive.
● Rethinking harmony in this piece.
● No repetition.
How does the presenter explain what makes the music of Mozart familiar to us? Then, what makes
Schoenberg's music different from that of Mozart?

Mozart used and improved on what came before him, he had material and a
structure to follow. Schoenberg was completely innovating, he wasn't using pre-
established structures or material. This makes his music sound challenging or
unknown to us.
Schoenberg’s Drei Klavierstücke

● The first two pieces are when

Schoenberg is considered to have
abandoned tonality.
● His wife left him for an artist but
returned, and the artist committed
suicide. This occurred while
writing this piece and can be
attributed as a cause for his
departure from tonality.
● I listened to this two times and am
struggling to form an opinion on it,
but it feels strangely intimate.
Schoenberg’s Erwartung
● According to Wikipedia,Schoenberg said
“In Erwartung the aim is to represent in
slow motion everything that occurs during
a single second of maximum spiritual
excitement stretching it out to half an
hour.”
● All I could think about while listening to
this piece is Star Wars.
● The synopsis of this piece is a woman
searching for her lover in a forest and
misrecognizing a tree stump as the
corpse of her lover, but then finding his
corpse.
● This piece evokes suspense and dread in
me. It is very unsettling.
The Empire Strikes Back had atonal music!

● John William’s uses atonal

elements when the camera is
focused on alien and unfamiliar
things to evoke those feelings.
● These more atonal pieces don’t
have any obvious patterns of
scales. They use many different
and unfamiliar scales and chords in
order to surprise the audience and
build tension.