Atonality

What it means

Atonality refers to music that has no tonic, no key, and no tonal center to which it relates. Unlike major-minor tonality, where all notes and chords relate back to a tonic, atonal music treats all twelve tones of the chromatic scale as fundamentally equal.

The term itself was originally used somewhat pejoratively by critics; many composers whose works are considered atonal avoided the word, preferring to speak of "pantonal" or "free" music instead.

Musical use

Atonal music emerged around 1908, chiefly in the circle of the so-called Second Viennese School around Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern, as a reaction to what they felt was the exhausted chromaticism of late Romanticism. From this initial "free atonality," which worked without any fixed ordering system, Schoenberg developed twelve-tone technique from the 1920s onward, a compositional method that arranges the twelve chromatic pitches into a fixed row to systematically avoid tonality.

Atonality is distinguished from twelve-tone technique and the serialism derived from it, which are specific methods for producing atonal music, whereas atonality broadly denotes the absence of a tonal center regardless of compositional method. It should also be distinguished from extended tonality, in which a tonal center is heavily obscured but still present.

Performance practice

When listening to atonal music, it helps not to search for a tonic or an expected resolution, but instead to attend to timbre, interval structures, and motivic repetition, which can create coherence even without a tonal center. When learning such works, it is worth practicing individual interval leaps in isolation first, since the ear cannot rely on familiar tonal patterns.