https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PECkwsfzDUI
OK, seriously folks... here is atonality at its very best: solemn, spiritual, Viennese, innately connected to the worst crises and traumas of the 20th century, and innately connected to the nostalgia for religious absolutes of its founder: Arnold Schoenberg. Atonal music at its very best is like the feeling you get from Freud or Wittgenstein at their best - as though you're gazing past the human composite into the darker essences where the will to life is primally formed (yes, I know that's Schopenhauer not them...), and once you see or hear that darker, more elemental truth about human impulses, you can't unlearn what you learned. If Auschwitz or the Somme could sing, this is the music they would sing.
Atonality is based on a very specific moment in the family of music history. Just as communism is an idea only conceivable out of European industrial capitalism, atonality and its identical twin - serialism, is only conceivable out of common practice Western tonality. Once tonality evolves to incorporate non-western tonal systems, let alone expand to all the various forms of mathematically ratio'd microtonality, and all their related polytonalities, atonality and serialism have no real interest. Atonality and serialism are rebellions against the music of 1910, and became a movement of the musical establishment by 1950.
And like so many academic movements based on critical theories formed in environs around German universities, atonality and serialism are movements that sound suspiciously like replacement religions. It has founding texts, founding myths, founding prophets, founding evangelists, and a long history of heretical schisms in which multiple sides claim to speak as the true mouthpiece for the original intent.
Two of the original heretics were Ernst Krenek and Hans Eisler, the former briefly became Mahler's son-in-law fifteen years after Der Meister died (the network of Viennese women who'd put up with with composers seemed to be very small...). Both quickly realized that atonality was a kind of intellectual litmus test for classical music that would make the concert hall into a clearing house meant to push out the uninitiated, and consequently were thrown out from the original circle before the original circle became merely an enshrined holy trinity for later atonalists to regard as their founding prophets who revealed to them the truth of music's future.
We'll come back to both Krenek and Eisler, but both of them moved back and forth between tonality and atonality rather freely. But Krenek is a particularly interesting case because fifteen years before writing this incredibly dissonant and long but strangely moving choral work, he wrote a jazz opera: Jonny Spielt Auf (Johnny Strikes Up), which, like so many works of the century's first third, was incredibly popular, and then the popularity was lost in the sea of totalitarianism. These works speak to us over the span of a century like more pleasant timeline of how our world might have developed. Krenek clearly understood that music is not written for a niche of initiates to confirm a revealed truth the church already knows, but to challenge a wider public from the most diverse possible backgrounds.
But this work is very much from our timeline. Premiered in 1941 and taking as its text the Lamentations of Jeremiah, it's clearly written to speak to its volatile time. This, is what atonality is meant to do, it expresses the cry of a whole civilization's shattered hopes. It is anything but intellectual. It is music whose emotions are so painful that no tonality can contain it. It is music that could only be written within its time and place, but the pain it expresses can reach out to any place and time.
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