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The most prominent school of musicians to compose in this manner were the " Second Viennese School" of Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern. However composers such as Josef Matthias Hauer, Béla Bartók, Aaron Copland, George Antheil and others wrote music which is described as atonal, and many more traditional composers "flirted with atonality", in the words of Leonard BernsteinLeonard Bernstein ( August 25, 1918 October 14, 1990) was an American Jewish composer and orchestra conductor. Bernstein was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts and studied at Harvard. He was highly regarded as a conductor, composer, pianist, and educator..

1 Short History of Atonality

The Second Viennese School's music described as "atonal" arose from what was described as the "crisis of tonality" in the late 19th Century and early 20th Century in classical music. Described by composer Ferruccio BusoniDante Michaelangelo Benvenuto Ferruccio Busoni ( April 1, 1866 July 27, 1924) was an Italian composer, pianist, music teacher and conductor. Biography Busoni was born in Empoli in Italy, the only child of two professional musicians: his German mother a pi as the exhaustion of the "Major/Minor key system", and by Schoenberg as the "inability of one tonal chord to assert dominance over all of the others." The first phase is often described as "free atonality" or "free chromaticism" and involved the conscious attempt to avoid patterns which had described musical form before. Works of this period include the opera WozzeckWozzeck is the first and most famous opera by Alban Berg. The opera was based an German playwright Georg Buchner's uncompleted Woyzeck''. Berg worked the material of the play into a libretto of three compact acts with five scenes each. Berg began work on (1917-1922) by Alban Berg and Pierrot LunairePierrot Lunaire ("Moonstruck Pierrot" or "Pierrot in the moonlight") is an important work of Arnold Schoenberg, a setting of Albert Giraud's work of French poems of the same name to music, translated into German. Pierrot, as it is also known, has a charac (1912) by Schoenberg. A much earlier study in the concept is Franz Liszt's Bagatelle sans tonalitéBagatelle sans tonalit ( Bagatelle without tonality) is a 1885 piece for solo piano written by Franz Liszt. It is a departure from tonality. The pieces is often considered as prediction of the direction of classical music rather than as part of the atonal (1885). The second period, begun after the war, was exemplified by the attempts to create a systematic means of composing without tonality, most famously the "method of composing with 12 tones" or 12 tone music, also referred to as dodecophonic (see twelve-tone techniqueTwelve-tone technique is a system of musical composition devised by Arnold Schoenberg. Music using the technique is called twelve-tone music . Josef Matthias Hauer also developed a similar system using unordered hexachords, or tropes at the exact same tim). This period included Berg's LuluLulu is an opera by the composer Alban Berg. The libretto was adapted from Frank Wedekind's plays Erdgeist ( 1895) and Die Buchse der Pandora ( 1903) by Berg himself. Conception and composition Berg first saw Die Buchse der Pandora in 1905 in a production and Lyric SuiteLyric Suite is a string quartet written by Alban Berg from 1925 to 1926 and (publically) dedicated to Alexander Zemlinsky. Introduction According to Berg's friend and Schoenberg pupil Erwin Stein, "The work (Ist and VIth part, the main part of the IIIrd a, Schoenberg's Piano Concerto , his opera Jacob's Ladder and numerous smaller pieces, as well as his final string quartets. Schoenberg was the innovator of the system, but his student Webern then began linking dynamics and tone color to his primary row as well, making the row not only of notes, but other aspects of music as well. This, combined with the parameterization of Messiaen, would be taken as the inspiration for serialism.

The word "atonality" emerged as a pejorative term to describe and to condemn music in which chords were organized seemingly with no apparent coherence. In Nazi Germany, atonal music was attacked as "Bolshevik" and labeled degenerate music (Entartete Musik), along with other music produced by enemies of the Nazi regime and those who they wished to condemn for political reasons. Many composers, even those who remained in Germany, had their works banned by the regime, not to be played until after its collapse at the end of World War II.

In the years that followed, atonality represented a challenge to many composers, and even those who did not prefer to write atonal music were influenced by it. The Second Viennese School, and particularly 12 tone composition, was taken by avant-garde composers in the 1950s to be the foundation of "The New Music", and led to serialism and other forms of musical experimentation. Prominent Post World War II composers in this tradition are Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luciano Berio, Krzysztof Penderecki and Milton Babbitt. Many composers began atonal music after the war, even if before they had pursued other styles, including Elliott Carter and Witold Lutoslawski. Famously, Igor Stravinsky, who lived down the street from Schoenberg, began to write exclusively yet serial music after Schoenberg's death, incorporating a mixture of tonal elements in his personal entry into chromaticism. During this time, the chord progressions or successions designed to avoid tonal center were explored and named, creating a vocabulary described as musical set theory focusing on pitch classes and pitch sets.

Atonal music continues to be composed, and many atonal composers of the late 20th century are still alive and active. However, the peak of atonality as the cutting edge of classical music began to fade in the 1960s - where, on one hand, aleatoric music and electronic music demanded more and more attention, and on the other, musicians influenced by Eastern mysticism, modality, and John Cage began writing music based on ostinato patterns which became Minimalism, after the movement in art from the same period.