Atonality Quotes

At Bloomington, Indiana, I was invited to listen to music written in quarter tones for four harps and voices. I had to go out to be sick.

I don't write things that are wildly abstractly atonal.

To me, atonality is against nature. There is a center to everything that exists. The planets have the sun, the earth, the moon.

Stravinsky influenced film music in general - those stabbing chords and rhythms from 'The Rite of Spring.'

Why is Schoenberg's Music so Hard to Understand?

First, it doesn't surprise me that traditional music has experienced a kind of exhaustion in the 20th century - not forgetting that many musicians started to look outside the traditional structures of tonality.

"Have you heard any Stockhausen?" Beecham was asked. "No, but I believe I have stepped in some."

Webern was a kind of 'Kamchatka of music,' an unknown country of music. That's true; for me and people of my generation, he was a radical - you couldn't be more radical than he was.

As a trumpet player, I was playing Xenakis, Lindberg: very challenging, technical, atonal, and I enjoyed it.

Post-minimalism implies music that's genre-less. Minimalism was very important because it came at a time when contemporary music had become so complex, so experimental and detached that people turned away from it. Minimalism broke that trend and brought music back to the people.

You think about, like, [20th-century classical composers] Alban Berg, Schoenberg, and Webern sitting around in some living room in Vienna and being like, "We are the end of music. We are the end of this tradition. Music is done."

All them weird chords which don't mean a thing...you got no melody to remember, and no beat to dance to

I want music to move me, and I don't think it can do that without at least a link to tonality. It's the tug between atonal and tonal which makes music poignant.

We were really interested in music from all over the world. We realized that what we were doing was very close to contemporary classical music because of the lack of tonality in the guitar- the fact that I play guitar the way I play.

I find above all that the expression, atonal music, is most unfortunate — it is on a par with calling flying the art of not falling, or swimming the art of not drowning.

I think the origin of all this clamour for tonality is not so much the need to sense a relationship to the tonic, as a need for familiar chords: let us be frank and say "for the triad"; and I believe I have good reason to say that just so long as a certain kind of music contains enough such triads, it causes no offence, even if in other ways it most violently clashes with the sacred laws of tonality.

In Britten or Berg, there's a tension between the sweet and the sour, between the familiar and the unfamiliar, the tonal and the atonal, the happy and the sad. That, to me, is what all western art is about - that tension. It's why we want to say anything at all.