Modern scores

What is atonal? A dialogue.

Bistron: Nonmusic? I find this description too strong — I have never heard it before. I believe that the opponents of atonal sonorities want to stress the antithesis with so-called beautiful music.

Alban Berg: As far as I’m concerned, that’s what it suggests. In any event, this collective term is intended to deny everything that makes up the content of music until now. I have already mentioned the words “arrhythmic,” “amelodic,” “asymmetric,” and I could cite a dozen more terms used to dismiss modern music, like cacophony or test-tube music, which have already partially faded from memory, or new ones like linearity, constructivism, New Objectivity, polytonality, machine music, etc. These may have relevance in certain specific cases, but they are all now brought together under a single umbrella in the phony notion of “atonal” music. The opponents of this music hold to it with great persistence so as to have a single term to dismiss all of new music by denying, as I said, the presence of what until now has made up music and thus to deny its justification for existing.

Julius Bistron: You may be seeing things too darkly, Mr. Berg! Perhaps what you say may have been the case until not too long ago. But today people know that atonal music in and of itself can be engaging and in certain cases will be so. In cases that are truly artistic! It is only a matter of showing whether atonal music can really be called music in that same sense as with earlier works. That is, whether, as you say, only the harmonic basis of new music has been changed, with all other elements of traditional music still present.