Exploring Atonal Music with WKMT.
For most of the piano students, atonal music is a black hole in their musical programmes. A couple of reasons might be the cause:
Firstly, their piano tutors have not even familiarized themselves with this kind of music.
Secondly, they don’t know the style as it is rarely seen in any grades. And thirdly, that they are not prone to search for more bald music, sometimes called “new music”.
But Atonal music is everything but new music; it has been around for a century now, so to term it “new” does not bring justice to the word.
It began with three men: Arnold Schonberg, Anton Webern and Alban Berg. These composers needed to expand their tonal horizons.
So much so, that they came up with another system than the tonal system that reigned for centuries since the Baroque period, roughly from the 1600 hundreds.
The questions that might arise now is “what is Atonal music“?
As Ana Ortiz says in her article “Just like in painting, the music went through a crisis phase around the times of World War I and developed a new system of expression that broke through the canons of beauty. The politics and social situation of instability and worry in Europe led all of the creative minds to crush the old system of an organized and clean canvas and created a visual and musical representation of Europe’s state of destruction. Atonality aims to express a feeling, an idea or even a political concept without stating prominent western classical elements. It is the idea of having an abstract thought that creates the artistic influence of “expressionism”. In music, atonality works in the same manner. It is the concept of fighting against the canon of the beauty of what is heard and seen. ”
In the more strict side of music, it is a system without a tonal centre, without the sense of coming home, or coming from it, to say the least.
It is undoubtedly challenging to play or listen, but worth it!
Compose your Music team will always bring you articles and posts for you to learn more about music. Let’s do this journey together. Click above on the question about atonal music to go through the full article and learn all about it.