Atonality
Vienna, 1908: the home key disappears, and harmony stops coming home.
Related
Time and place
Vienna around 1908. Schoenberg lets the key lose its centre in his Second String Quartet; Berg writes his Piano Sonata; Webern compresses music into the shortest phrases. In the early 1920s he rebuilt a frame with twelve-tone rows.
What happened
Late Romantic chromatic harmony had pulled every note far from home. Schoenberg stopped demanding a return: no tonic, no obligation to resolve dissonance, chords standing on their own. Without a key, music held form through motive, interval, colour and rhythm. In 1923 he arranged the twelve semitones into a row, forbidding repetition before the other eleven, replacing a tonal centre with an order.
What changed
Harmony stopped ruling form, and composers had to invent a grammar for each work. Listeners lost the expectation of where the music should go, and music became something to analyse. Atonality and twelve-tone writing entered the academy, film and horror sound, and pushed later composers toward serialism and chance. Tonality was not destroyed; it stopped being the only answer.
Listen to the turn
Berg's Piano Sonata keeps the frame of a sonata, yet the theme cannot find a tonic. The last of Schoenberg's Five Pieces Op. 23 bring the twelve-tone method forward. Webern's Variations Op. 27 break interval and colour into points, the texture thinned to a few grains in strict symmetry.
Related
This turn belongs to Modern; see Tonality, Chromaticism and Motivic Development.
Listen in the library
All tracks from midicn-lib — inline badge is the license tier (C1 commercial / C2 non-commercial / C3 study only).
Sources
- Taruskin, Music in the Early Twentieth Century（Oxford, 2010），用于核对勋伯格、贝尔格与韦伯恩的年代
- Grove Music Online 的 Atonality 与 Twelve-note music 条目，用于交叉核对术语与作品
Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.