atonal

An example of atonal music would be Arnold Schoenberg's “Pierrot Lunaire”, which is a song cycle composed in 1912. The work uses a technique called “Sprechstimme” or spoken singing, and the music is atonal, meaning that there is no clear tonal center or key.

Atonality is simply the absence of tonality, tonality being the musical system based on major and minor keys. Now it's true that atonal music often includes lots of harsh dissonance… but so too does tonal music, the music of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven.

nounMusic. the absence of key or tonal center. an atonal principle or style of composition.

The word atonal combines a-, "not," and tonal, from the Greek tonos, "pitch, accent, or key." Definitions of atonal. adjective. characterized by avoidance of traditional western tonality. synonyms: unkeyed.

The twelve-tone technique is an extreme way to compose atonally. It requires the composer to use all of the twelve available pitches (in whatever order or octave) equally, so no one note is emphasized more than the others - because that might accidentally reference a certain tonality.

Arnold Schoenberg was an Austrian-American composer who created new methods of musical composition involving atonality, namely serialism and the 12-tone row. He was also an influential teacher; among his most significant pupils were Alban Berg and Anton Webern.

/ˈtoʊnl/ 1(technology) relating to tones of sound or color. Definitions on the go. Look up any word in the dictionary offline, anytime, anywhere with the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary app. (music) having a particular key opposite atonal.

Atonal music, which began to emerge in the early twentieth century, features music that does not have a tonal center.

12-note No tonal center: Atonal music does not exist in a major key or a minor key. Based around the chromatic scale: In Western music, the chromatic scale is a 12-note scale that involves all available pitches played in order.

The technique is a means of ensuring that all 12 notes of the chromatic scale are sounded as often as one another in a piece of music while preventing the emphasis of any one note through the use of tone rows, orderings of the 12 pitch classes.

Composer Arnold Schoenberg Composer Arnold Schoenberg developed this kind of atonal music in the 1920s. In Western music we have twelve pitches possible within an octave. For most tonal music you hear only seven tones in a scale, sometimes with a few accidentals thrown in.

Atonal music is, broadly speaking, music that doesn't follow the rules of tonality. These rules work to create tonal hierarchies, or systems in which certain notes are more important to the music than others. Composers interested in atonality work to break these rules by making all notes more equal in importance.