Music History
After Tonality: What Composers Replaced It With
When chromatic harmony outgrew the tonal hierarchy, composers tried serial rules, rhythm, folk modes, and sound mass. What each method actually solved.
Atonality
Music that does not organise its pitches around a tonic or key, so no note or chord has a home or a pull toward one.
Also called: atonal music, non-tonal music
Atonality describes music that does not organise its pitches around a tonic. In atonal music no pitch or chord is established as the home of the piece, and the hierarchy of stable and unstable notes found in tonal music is absent or greatly reduced. Composers in the early twentieth century, such as Schoenberg, developed atonal styles, and later serial and set-theoretic methods organised pitches in other ways. Atonal writing often relies on pitch-class sets, intervals and registral design rather than on a key. Atonal is not the same as chromatic: a chromatic passage can still be tonal, while an atonal passage may use all twelve pitch classes without a tonal centre.
Related terms
- TonalityA system in which pitches are organised around a tonic and a key, so that some notes and chords sound more stable than others.
- Pitch classAll the pitches that share one name across octaves, such as every C, treated as a single class of notes.
- Chromatic scaleA scale of all twelve semitones in an octave, built from half steps alone, with each pitch spelled by a sharp or a flat.
- KeyThe tonic and scale that a passage centres on, against which its notes and chords are heard.