Recommend some Atonal Music

[calebprime]

I was asked to recommend some atonal music.

The perpetrator of the request was a large white canine, approximately 6 foot 5 and weighing 120 pounds, prominent belly, with sagging jowls and red hair. I heard him say his destination was "sometimes". On foot.



This first version is off the top of my head only! Maybe to be followed by revised and amended list.

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Let's begin before atonality, and cover the transition.

Heh. Bach. Some fugues are so chromatic that they're almost atonal

Mozart -- Dissonance quartet intro, fugue in Jupiter, other chromatic moments, multiple bands at once in Don G.

Wagner
Bruckner
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Mahler -- last works verge on atonality at times
Hugo Wolf -- so chromatic and extreme that he's almost atonal

Schoenberg 1 -- Up to Gurrelieder

(but not Liszt, who was always a show-off)

Scriabin, his piano music but not his orchestral music, which sounds bombastic

Szymanowski wrote the orchestral music that Scriabin seemed to be going for,
and it too is often extremely bombastic. Wagner with his silk underwear removed, plunged into vast panerotic orgies. Sometimes magic, sometimes overwritten. Amphibious -- half in, half out.

Shostakovich -- the preludes and fugues for piano, the string quartets (mostly astringent and elusive but very good and very unique)

Sibelius

Not Max Reger, who is merely overstuffed, overelaborate, like a lesser William James


Ives tonal

Bartok tonal

Stravinsky tonal

Samuel Barber tonal

Copland tonal

Messiaen tonal (maybe one piece out of four or five)

Carter tonal -- imo never had the ear of a Copland or an Ives, but had a sense of design and a work-ethic. Many of his early pieces are sort-of tonal.


Brits: Tippett, B. Britten, Walton
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(Atonal Side, or composer's atonal)

Schoenberg atonal
Berg (both Berg and Webern apprenticed with tonal works)
Webern

Ives atonal

Bartok atonal

Stravinsky atonal

Samuel Barber atonal

Carter atonal -- Variations for Orch. more accessible than Piano Concerto


Varese


Dallopiccola

Peter Lieberson

Mario Davidovsky

Boulez -- try Repons, other pieces from this (fairly late) period


===================================
Rock and Jazz

The canine individual already knows these cats

Zappa
Eric Kloss
Pat Martino
Miles Davis
Coltrane
Mcoy Tyner
Jarrett
Jaki Byard
Hermeto

some recent fave pianists who can play out if they choose: Billy Childs, Stephen Scott,


Heh. Bill Evans. Give the man enough cocaine and enough chord changes, and he could approach atonality through sheer gabbiness

Hiromi (just so that varwoche doesn't have to så¥ it)

 

[The Sparrow]

I've always been fond of Stravinski's Symphony of Psalms. Is it strictly atonal? Perhaps not so much.

[arrogant opinion]
I think eventualy the atonal movement just got ridiculous about trying to sound non musical, and just became (as my wife calls it) clanging noise.
Chords and intervals sound nice. Tonality sounds nice. Too much dissonance gets to be a horrid mess after a while
[/arrogant opinion]

 

[calebprime]

Hindemith

Sparrow: I agree.

There is one aspect of personal taste, how much disorder you'll accept in a piece.

I notice my friend Bruto, whose taste is in some ways similar to mine, can't accept Ives. It's not hard to imagine why. Ives wrote some half-baked, noisy music.

But I think Ives is important because of all the effective, amazing music he did manage to write that could be heard -- I mean that most of it is sort of problematic, but not over-the-edge noise.

 

[alfaniner]

Should Charles Mingus or Theolonius Monk be in there?
(I always get those two names mixed up.)

 

[calebprime]

Yes, as brilliant expanders of tonality who came close to atonality at times.

Ginastera. (sp?)

Roger Sessions, but not serial Sessions, and only when he wanted to be pretty.

Sessions was capable of great ugliness.

Sessions came to talk to the young composers at NEC, as a very old man. The only thing I remember was that he was so old that when he said, slowly, haltingly, " I......had.........(pause).....a....wife.....once..." you realized he wasn't so good on specifics any more, and the wife had happened a long time ago.

I don't like the atonal Prokofiev. He never figured it out, imo.

Nancarrow, if you don't mind clattering ugliness -- now there Sparrow's wife would rightly object.

Ruggles for a lesson in trying to maintain continual tension/ecstasy -- it can't be done, but he tried to.



I wouldn't do Mingus and Monk justice by trying to sort them out. Very different, but they almost sound the same in quick description.

 

[calebprime]

Henze -- some pieces, some of the time


For the next phase, let me start going through my CD collection.

There are a lot of excellent composers who aren't on the tip of my tongue.

 

[calebprime]

Composers who -- as the pooch knows -- are huge, therefore they have things I love and hate:
Ives 65
Hindemith 45
Stravinsky (95% love)
Schoenberg (45% love)
Bartok 65
Shostakovich 35

medium-sized composers:
Copland 55

Small but have their pleasures:
Nancarrow 15


Tiny little pieces of matter stuck to things:
Virgil Thompson .5
John Cage .05

 

[calebprime]

not atonal, but oddly tonal:

Wendy Carlos -- microtonal

Meredith Monk -- ECM weirdness, vocalist

I'm listing them in the same post only because I just thought of them, not because they especially belong together.

 

[applecorped]

One Direction

 

[calebprime]

Chick Corea, of course

Oh, and just ask me for specific pieces, though that might take me longer.

 

[Childlike Empress]

What's with this? Standing in the audience, it sounded kind of atonal to me at least in layman terms:

 

[calebprime]

cd collection:

Kalevi Aho
Arthur Berger -- wrote both neoclassical and astringent but good chamber pieces
Morton Feldman -- we can talk about whether you like this soft, spacey music

 

[calebprime]

Walter Piston -- the symph. from early to late get more atonal
nice gray area, unique but not too far from Hindemith

both of their stocks have appreciated nicely in the last few years

 

[varwoche]

<snort>

The defining characteristics of atonality elude my puny ear/brain. I can identify obvious atonality, but I'm not so sure about the borderline examples. I enjoy stealth modernism, sounding 'normal' until I focus in. e.g. Rubalcaba is frequently in a weird tonal space, but I'm not sure it would be considered atonal.

Rambling on... There's a passage in Concerto for Orchetra I wish I could describe short of posting YouTube and noting the elapsed time, which asks a lot of Caleb's time.

I need to re-discover Hindemith without buying a turntable.

 

[calebprime]

Maybe there's a psychological def -- music which to a given listener doesn't conform to tonal expectations at least, or doesn't have an intelligible center of tonality (an imaginary pedal-tone or series of pedal-tones around which the rest of the pitches seem to be organized.)

Then a historical def -- music from Schoenberg 2cnd quartet onward.

All the stuff I've been listing is impure atonality except for perhaps Webern.

Everything I like has tonal referents, associations, gravity, tension and release, etc.

The gray area -- from mid-period Schoenberg all the way to Rubalcaba.

I bet R hears it all tonally, but it exceeds what we as listeners can hear, so it sounds "almost atonal".

I've always been interested in the gray area, to the exclusion of things that seem "too atonal" or on the other hand too simple.

In my travels, I've encountered at least three composers who didn't like to mix tonal and atonal thinking -- that this was some kind of punning or double meaning. Fie on their houses. Let their children perish.

 

[calebprime]

The Ur-piece of tonality is the drone bass.

As it moves up in register, though, a given drone bass becomes not a bass any more, and can be re-interpreted in more and more ways within strictly harmonic frameworks.

A single tone then becomes not definitive, but ambiguous as it moves up. Indian music, with high-register drones.

Western music to a large extent is about re-interpreting medium-to-high register drones so that their meaning or color changes.

A single sustained high tone is harmonically ambiguous. More tonally-strong than a single tone, then, is a series of tones that behaves according to (tonal) expectations.

Western music is also about harmony with independence of melodic voices, either in counterpoint or homophony, as in Bach chorales.

This principle of independence of voices is, in embryo, almost the principle of atonality waiting to happen: freedom, elaboration, independence, anarchy, argument. When you have voices moving in and out of a harmony via a passing-tone, you already have the seeds of atonality in that simple elaboration.

It's only when the referent becomes too elaborated that it begins to be obscured, that we're in my preferred zone here. Not fully simple, not fully obscure.

Atonality is very much like lack of perspective or weird perspective in painting, and like language without enough solid referents that you can understand what is being said.

There is a transition from See Dick Run, through the entire career of Joyce, ending in modernist overreach, if you will. The book that no-one read past page 60, Finnegans Wake, the atonal book.

Cubism is something like serialism -- codified lack of/altering of perspective.

 

[JJM 777]

I don't recommend atonal music. It is disappointing stuff.

 

[calebprime]

I'm not familiar, but I think these are good:

Roussel (more tonal than atonal)
Rubbra
Rautavaara

 

[calebprime]

Takemitsu (except one piece was an attempt to use jazzoid music, and it was lame, not sure of title)

 

[calebprime]

Penderecki -- whose study wasn't famous until he called it "Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima" -- mixed rec. -- some pieces brutally schematic

Partch