Is there any good tonal music left to be written?

Is there any good tonal music left to be written?

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music is over guys everyone go home

Probably, but I would wait until the international music board adds those 2 new notes.

No, atonality is the future.

Depends what you mean by tonal music.
Has strict functionality been pretty thoroughly explored, sure, but there's still plenty of room for exploration while still embracing the ideas of pitch-centricity and more generalised approaches to functional relationships.

are you a time traveler from 1917

All music is tonal.
(inb4 some smartass retorts with 4'33")

atonal stuff is the most boring, yet so intriguing music. How does it do it?

yep, the western canon has barely scratched the surface. we don't even use the seventh overtone, really

?
youtube.com/watch?v=bQHR_Z8XVvI

Yep, that's made up of tones. So it's tonal.

the argument is: when people hear any music, they process it in terms of relative pitch. tonicization is actually pretty strong in classic twelve-tone music because the rhythms aren't serialized

have you ever had to build a 12 tone matrix? It's annoying as fuck.

You need to have talent to pull it off. If your a hack it just blends together, if you're a genius or know what your doing it'll sound phenominal.

I lucked out, we built one in theory class and had to know how to do if for a test, but our teacher gave up a website to do it by entering the first row

of course. there are infinite combinations of melody, harmony, rhythm, timbre and orchestration.

in 2017, atonality is the past. It sounds like the early-mid 20th century.

learn what "tonal" means:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonality

Dear lord, I wish I was as lucky as you. We not only had to build one, but also identify a row/column in a score.

>all music is tonal

Looks like someone didn't take a theory class

We also did that not for a complete score, but sections of different pieces. But I can do one, and actually enjoy it. I just have to be in the mood for it and be able to focus for an hour or so.

I'm guessing that would be to demonstrate that you understand voice leading in an atonal context. If you can follow a line in the score, then you can pick out the row.

XD actually I love fucking with that shit, like you can do half rows and repeats. I'd literally be the dick to make it where you want to shoot yourself by the end of it because I think it's funny. And to make pretentious people feel dumb.

I'm just to be clear

It's not always clear in atonal things, such as , which makes it quite complicated. It can be slightly twisted and offset by a few notes.

I'm sure it just as enjoyable as sudoku to some people. I, personally, hate both.

to each their own my Sup Forumsde

youtu.be/mrI39Nf7cj4
I think this is a pretty good example of tonality being taken in something of a new direction, plus she got into Gaudeamus this year so the contemporary classical world seems to think so too

No, there will be a modal resurgence in the next few years.

neo-renaissance please

that was a really fun listen

I disagree. It felt like tasteless minimalism. A piece made of theory without any charm, character or expression.

The most neutral sounding Schoenberg has 100 times more expression that this piece.

yes you silly dumb dumb
youtube.com/watch?v=MWO84mScCcc&list=PLT5J5rAGmvUFjIsZ4tPnbLDLsypTLqNSI

Atonalism was a bad idea that didn't work and left the Western Art Music tradition in the precarious situation it's now in, having alienated audiences for decades by catering to fucked up, anti-musical, try-hards, instead of making music. Fortunately, by some miracle, John Adams exists.

What is the future then?

Really? I thought the excessive cadences were going to be annoying at first but the deconstruction into sliding and reconstruction of the cadence motif with the sliding then the re-deconstruction into "finger notes aggressively on the fingerboard" was a charming and humorous way of presenting it.

I liked it, and would revisit to better analyze those chords because it kinda went to fast for me to process or analyze it. Though it say many cadences.

I need to relisten before I give a verdict of pointless. With music like this I don't like saying that until I sit down and think about it. There might be something you over look. Your brain might work faster than mine though, but I just wanna sit on it first. But I can see where your coming form.

This is cool. Thanks.

I'm not surprised by your reaction. What an honor must it have been it for the second Viennese school to leave with such a legacy.

I think that's kind of the point, its part of the hard conceptualism movement in contemporary classical music at the moment which has eschewed any form of expressionism

whether or not you think music should be expressive or entertaining isn't really relevant in the face of this music, it's sheer technical cynicism

Right now we have individualism: composers doing whatever they like and not sticking to any one idea (sometimes changing from tonal to atonal to minimal to hyper complex in the same piece).

The future is probably more individualism. Atonality seems to be going out of fashion even in academic circles, but it probably won't ever fully die.

The present day involves live electronics, pre recorded "tape" parts, synthesizers, electric guitars and other non-traditional instruments (in fact all of these elements have been around since the 50s / 60s), as well as the sound an instrument producing causing different things to happen in an effects rig (a type of live electronics, but with the player generating their own effects amounts and/or settings - providing slightly different performances each time.

There is also a much more lenient stance on tonal music. It is no longer looked down on in universities and conservatories as it was in the 60s and 70s.

well I mean I wouldn't say that the polystylism you describe is naturally inherent in individualism, if anything they just popped up simultaneously as products of postmodernism

imo there's more composers current writing in a consistent style than polystylistically, but I guess this just comes down to perspective

I agree with everything else you've said

>part of the hard conceptualism movement in contemporary classical music at the moment which has eschewed any form of expressionism
That movement has existed since the 50s, its nothing particularly new.

Music that is pure theory is like math - it explains itself, and makes sense on the page, but you wouldn't listen to someone reading out equations and numbers, so why listen to pure theory?

imo music should have at least some connection to the human condition. Even Stockhausen and Ferneyhough wanted a reaction or to make the audience feel something. What was posted here doesn't seem to want to evoke anything except "look at how smart I am, this piece should win a competition"

Many of these movements have already happened, just as how many techniques have been explored. I would like to hear the resurgence of micro tonality in western music perhaps. Until technology evolved further and newer instruments are invented, only course of action would be using current technology and instruments in a way they weren't meant to.

idk I mean a piece like this definitely couldn't have been written in the 50's, even if they did have the technology, the philosophy and theory just wasn't there yet
youtu.be/2-BZfFakpzc

the point that they're making is music doesn't HAVE to make you feel anything, instead it can say something

yeah check this out, its extraordinarily ugly but in terms of technical use of microtonality I think its pretty fantastic (the tuning of the pianos shift throughout)

youtu.be/VpKcQZQl2Nw

Another innovation would be multiple people playing a single instrument or an unusual amount of players on a particular instrument in an orchestra or a band. Music which couldn't be performed by humans incorporated into regular live performances. Perhaps spontaneous musique concrete as well.

You hear of the liquid piano?

Yes

>the point that they're making is music doesn't HAVE to make you feel anything, instead it can say something

Words in a book can say something. Music can say things and still provoke a reaction in the listener. In fact, its much more effective when an audience reacts to it. A piece can be about the best subject in the world and incredibly well researched and worked out, but if it sounds like shit no-one beyond a select few composers or musicologists will care.

microtonality has become a standard tool for composers, it is often used.

This is from 1996, so not exactly cutting edge, but still one of the most effective use of microtones imo:
youtube.com/watch?v=sHI2xyyH-CU

By impossible to play for humans I mean a continuation of explorations done by Conlon Nancarrow on player pianos and synclavier compositions by Zappa.

essentially dark midi but good?

It their works could be classified as such, they were "good", but hardly anyone dared to explore as much.

While I don't necessarily agree with your sentiments on process-music in general. I'm right there with you about John Adams. The man's a God.

I don't hate process oriented music in general. A lot of Adams's stuff is very process oriented and that aspect of what he's doing elevates his stuff to the crazy celestial level it's at. What I don't like is atonalism specifically. The way I see it it's a rejection of the language of music. A fun experiment, and if it produced effective music I would be all for it. But it very clearly doesn't in my opinion. What sets Adams apart from the failure of atonal process oriented music is his masterful use of process oriented techniques in arrangement, rhythm, and form, coupled with his mastery of the tonal language of music.

Ah, fair enough. I guess I assumed you were agains process-music overall simply because of the particular ways you railed against atonality. People who call musical movements try-hard or anti-music tend to be against absolute music as a whole.

In that case, I'm largely in agreement. Maybe I'm a little more forgiving of it than you are (I quite enjoy trying to pick apart the tonal relationships which develop naturally from the serialisation processes in pieces specifically designed to be atonal), but I agree that the dedecaphonic ideal is a bad one, even if it's not necessarily an actualisable one.

How do you feel about atonal practice as a means of generating interesting tonal music? By that, I mean both stuff like early Webern where the horizontal language is purely dodecaphonic, but no attempts have been made to avoid regular tertian harmonies being generate vertically, as well as more straightforward and clearly tonal stuff like 12-tone melodies being harmonised with standard functional harmony?

Surely that doesn't bother you?

So what about pieces which were written with the intention of democratising all 12 pitches, but which don't manage it?

I don't really care what the rules of someone's process are. For me, what matters is how effective the music is. I like Adams so much, and particularly the Dharma at Big Sur, because the impression it gives is that everything is masterfully coordinated in a unified act of musical, emotional, communication. The process oriented aspects - the multi-scale poly-rhthmic/metric approach of the arrangement (this is what I think is happening in the piece just from listening, I don't know for sure) - ads a layer of complexity to what's being communicated that surpasses the complexity of a more linear approach, and yet when you zoom in on any part of that process-oriented structure, you find a coherent, linear idea. It's a masterful use of process for the purpose of musical communication.

I don't like the opposite - musical communication ignored in favor of strict adherence to process that may or may not produce something that communicates anything. In the end, if a strict process oriented approach of whatever kind produces something that's effective in the way I'm trying to describe, then that's great, but it's great because the thing produced is great, not because of any feature of the rules.

is that really tonal though? i mean, there's literally several modulations each bar
anyway, this sounds great

>tfw literally to stupid for atonality