Question for the atonality fans

[pies]

What makes you love atonal/dissonant works so dearly?

[jre58591]

well, i dont love all atonal works, but for the ones i do like, its the intrigue and the mystery  that i can feel from a piece. also, some effects in atonality are pretty cool. clusters are awesome, haha (but not always).

[pita bread]

What makes you love tonal works so dearly?

[pies]

What makes you love tonal works so dearly?

I get bored of tonal stuff quicker. There is too much excitement in atonality.

[dnephi]

Onlyrsn I can imagine is that they let themselves break rules, like romantics, but went too far & fell off the edge.
prdon me.

[debussy symbolism]

Greetings.

I love certain atonal music. I don't exactly can pinpoint the reason why, but some of it just sounds good and intriguing. I really don't know how to explain my enjoyment of some "atonal" music, but I can say that atonal music with a sense of variations on tonality is very interesting. Then there is theory. I don't think that all atonal music should be restricted to be called "atonal". There is semitonal, non dodecaphonic, etc.

[invictious]

Because if you play any wrong notes, the examiner, teacher and the audience won't notice any wrong notes.

It's also an art, to have no what we call, key structure, because it's somewhat open and free to me, although other people may disagree and shoot me.

[jre58591]

Because if you play any wrong notes, the examiner, teacher and the audience won't notice any wrong notes.

perhaps they will be able to detect your wrong notes, unless your teacher is a complete idiot. atonal music has structure too. it isnt just random notes, as a lot of people unfortunately think.

[desordre]

 Dear Pies:
 My answer is as simply as it can be: I love non-tonal (not just atonal, but pantonal, bi/politonal, modal and polimodal, serial, etc, etc, etc) music because it can express moods and feelings and things that tonal music can't. Furthermore, it is the label of an era, that is already opened: ours.
 One example: Penderecki's Threnody. By no means one could depict the misery and disgrace of the destroyed japanese city in tonal music. Even a very chromatic minor tonality can not represent the horror of an atomic bomb falling, the massive death. When I listen to this composition, I always think about the strange and harsh world we live in, something that don't occur to me when I listen to Beethoven, for instance.
 Of course, if you think about Webern's Bagatelles, or Berio's Sequenze, or any other great non-tonal work, you can find a wide palette of emotions and situations, that are neither better nor worst than the ones tonality can sing: they are different. That is, in my most humble opinion, the magic: we can listen to everything, from plainchant to McMillan, and every style is significative of its surroundings, which help us in the process of understanding so distinct times and places that are our heritage.
 Best wishes!
 

[quantum]

It's a break from tonality.   A break from the expected and predictable.  The sounds, and playing more with tonal qualites than on harmony. 

Breaking rules is also very fun.  Going against a common theory and developing a piece to exploit the broken theory. 

[desordre]

 Dear Invictious:

Because if you play any wrong notes, the examiner, teacher and the audience won't notice any wrong notes.
(...)

It's a pity that you have this sort of examiner, teacher and audience. Probably they don't notice when listening to wrong notes in Liszt also. And, most sad, they are the kind of people who blame the horn player on Beethoven's Eroica...

(...)
It's also an art, to have no what we call, key structure, because it's somewhat open and free to me, although other people may disagree and shoot me.

Oh, boy... I don't want to shoot you, but I must tell you: don't write such a crap. Examples of non-tonal music: Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, Boulez's Le Marteau sans Maitre, Cage's Music of Changes, Stockhausen's Klavierstuck XI, and Reich's Four Organs.
Do you know the techniques used, how they unfold musically, the ways of listening to every of them, the approach towards performance of these works? If you don't, try to figure out: you will certainly change your opinion; but if you do and think the way you do, please share your reasons (of course, I'm not talking about subjective opinions).
 Best wishes!

[minor9th]

I find the drama/angst/tension very appealing.

[invictious]

Yea, I was joking about the people here in HK, nothing serious there.

Incase you didn't wonder. *peace*

[prometheus]

I love some things in music. I don't really care if the music is atonal or not. I look for other elements. What I look for is hard to describe. I don't think that I am consciously aware of it.

[mikey6]

Please Please people! It's called the "emancipation of dissonance" 

[melengi]

the obvious appeal of dissonance, at least for me, is that it can create many more interesting colours than conventional tonality.

[ahinton]

The very notion of "atonality fans" is either a nonsense, a gross misnomer or both. "Tonality", "atonality" and all points in between are all relative; the entire thing is relative. We should, if discussing this, be talking about "how" tonal or otherwise any given passage of music may be. As I have had cause to point out on many previous occasions, "tonality" and "atonality" are in the ear of the beholder and will impress in accordance only with the level and extent of each listener's aural experiences. I was raised on Webern and the more "radical" music of the various composers of what one might loosely term the Darmstadt / Donaueschingen / Köln axis of the post-WW2 years before hearing much "tonal" music at all; whilst this may be seen by some as a somewhat unusual introduction to musical experience, it has probably also coloured my view as to what may or may not be "tonal" or "atonal" - or, more properly, "how" tonal or atonal any given passage of music may be. Frankly, so what? It still doesn't and cannot alter the nature of the music itself; all it can do is have some influential bearing on how I might perceive it it "tonality" terms.

That said, why would we seek to value or even categorise music principally as "tonal", "atonal" or whatever? What surely matters is how good it is, how powerful is the experience of listening to it and to what extent does it do what the (very firmly tonal) Cornish composer George Lloyd once declared that he expected music to do - that is to take the listener to places that he (or she) would not otherwise go...

Best,

Alistair

[melengi]

Well put, i would have to agree that perception of tonality being, as you mentioned, a product of experience, will vary on a continuous scale. One thing i would say, though, is that the more "dissonant" music gets, again a vast sliding scale, the fewer the people able to appreciate it. Whether this is due to the degree of musicality, experience, pretentions or a combination of all 3 will be particular to each individual.