Music Video Lesson: What is Atonality? - Part 1

Welcome to VirtualSheetMusic.com and LivingPianos.com. I am Robert Estrin with the first in a two-part series. What is atonality? You've heard it in spooky movies and such where the notes clash, and you have strange dissonances. Unlike most music which is melodic and you could sing, atonal music is much more complex.

So whereas most music, Western music, that is is based upon major and minor scales forming nice tonal music that's pretty and digestible, atonal music is based upon oftentimes what's called the tone row or all 12 notes. All the chromatics are arranged in some pattern of a random nature that the entire piece is built upon. So atonal, for example, like this. Imagine building a piece out of that instead of a major scale. And you could end up with all kinds of dissonances. Chords like that will occur.

So that is, in a nutshell, what atonality is. Built upon tone rows, having all 12 tones instead of just the 7th plus the 8th note being the 1st note, again, of a major or minor scale. And we can go into more depth about what atonality is in future videos. Thanks so much for joining me. Robert Estrin, here at LivingPianos.com and VirtualSheetMusic.com.

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

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