Atonality

Atonality describes music that departs from the system of tonal hierarchies, which characterizes the sound of classical European music between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Atonality usually describes compositions written from about 1900 to the present day, where the hierarchy of tonal centers is not used as the primary way to organize a work. Tonal centers gradually replaced modal organization starting in the 1500s and culminated with the establishment of the major-minor key system in the late 1600s and early 1700s.

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The most prominent school to compose in this manner was the Second Viennese School of Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern. However, composers such as Josef Matthias Hauer, B?la Bart?k, Aaron Copland, George Antheil, and others wrote music that is described as atonal, and many traditional composers ?flirted with atonality,? in the words of Leonard Bernstein.

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Music: Music is a natural intuitive phenomenon operating in the three worlds of time, pitch, energy, and under the three distinct and interrelated organization structures of rhythm, harmony, and melody....

Classical: The word classical has several meanings:...

Seventeenth: REDIRECT List of pipe organ stops...