Music Video Lesson: What is Atonality? - Part 2

Hi, welcome to VirtualSheetMusic.com, and LivingPianos.com.

Today's question is, does atonality go against nature? This sounds like a really loaded question, and it's likely to elicit very strong responses. You know, this is almost a philosophical question. But first, I'm going to talk a little bit about what atonality is and how it goes against tonality, the foundation of Western music in some ways, arguably.

Well, Western music is built upon the overtone series, which is a fact of nature. That is, all vibrating objects contain color tones, so when you're hearing a fundamental pitch, it actually contains other notes within it. And indeed, any vibrating object elicits these pitches, so on a string instrument you can get the same series of notes that you would get blowing through a garden hose, or a French horn. It's all the same series. And what is that series? It goes as follows...

You notice the intervals that start out very large: The octave, then the perfect fifth, the perfect fourth, the major third, getting smaller and smaller. But what makes it possible to hear these intervals is that they are simple relationships. An octave is just a 2:1 relationship. Sound is merely vibrations, and when you have, for example, an A, that's 440 cycles per second. That's right, your eardrum is actually vibrating back and forth 440 times every second. If you play an octave higher, that's 880 cycles per second, so we hear it as the same note. Now a fifth, a perfect fifth, is a 3:1 relationship. It's pretty easy to hear a fifth, a fourth. As you get more distant and more dissonant, the relationship becomes more and more extreme. So for example, a minor second is a very distant relationship and has a very extremely distant sound. Why? Because it's hard for your brain to make mathematical sense out of it, because it's so distantly related. So, some things are harder for you to digest mathematically, and we call that dissonance.

So the question is, does this go against nature? Well, as I said at the beginning, this is a philosophical question. Think about this for a minute. If you think about the entire universe as being orderly, then indeed atonality goes against nature. But if you think about the universe as being chaotic, then indeed atonality is an expression of the universe. So the question is, is the universe ordered, or do we just find order in it for our own survival? And this is an interesting question that there are very many books written about and religions based upon, because ultimately we must find order out of chaos even when there is chaos to make our way in this world. So we always strive to find structures and patterns and things, just to be able to make sense of the world around us. That's why tonality is so refreshing, because we can digest it easily, much more easily than atonality. Yet, if something doesn't present us with enough challenges intellectually, it's boring. But if it's too chaotic, and you can't find any order whatsoever, it's equally incomprehensible and therefore boring as well. That fine line of being able to have some kind of structure seems to be what we can hold onto in life and in art.

So that is my opinion, and I'm interested in hearing about yours. The question is, what is your intellectual capacity for making order out of chaos, or finding order in things? Some people like much simpler structures than others, which can explain why some people love atonal music and other people abhor it.

So, thanks for the questions coming in, and I'm very interested in your comments on this video. Again, Robert Estrin here at VirtualSheetMusic.com and LivingPianos.com.

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