Atonality and serialism: the Second Viennese School by ear

This is the music people mean when they say they do not like modern classical music, and it is worth beginning with the honest position: most listeners find it hard, and there are structural reasons for that which have nothing to do with philistinism. But it is also, once you know three or four tells, among the easiest music in the repertoire to place — and to place tightly, often within a decade.

Why tonality broke

It was not a fashion that turned. Tonality — the system in which one note is home, and every other note is heard in relation to it — depends on dissonances that need resolving. Chromaticism spent the nineteenth century making those resolutions later and less certain. Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde (1865) opens with a chord whose resolution is deferred for four hours; Mahler, Strauss and Scriabin took the process further, until by about 1905 a piece could spend most of its length in no determinate key at all.

At that point the key had stopped doing any structural work. Schoenberg’s move, around 1908, was to notice this and stop pretending. He called it the emancipation of the dissonance: dissonant chords no longer required resolution, because nothing was any more consonant than anything else. He thought of it not as destruction but as the next logical step in a German tradition running from Bach.

Free atonality, 1908 to 1921

The first phase has no system. Free atonality means the composer simply avoids anything that would imply a key: no repeated scale pattern, no cadence, no returning phrase, no note lingered on. Listen to Schoenberg’s Three Piano Pieces Op. 11 (1909) or Erwartung (1909) and the sound is unmistakably Expressionist — nervous, fragmentary, hurtling between a near-inaudible whisper and a shriek, full of leaps of a ninth where a step would do.

These pieces are almost all short. That is not an accident. Tonality had been the thing that let a composer sustain a twenty-minute movement, by leaving home and coming back; without it, there was nothing to hold long forms together. Free atonality’s characteristic forms are the aphorism and the setting of a text, where words supply the shape.

Pierrot lunaire (1912) is the emblem: twenty-one short settings for a reciter and five players, and the introduction of Sprechstimme, a delivery halfway between speech and song in which the voice touches a pitch and slides off it. If you hear that, you are in 1912 or later, and almost certainly hearing Schoenberg or someone copying him.

Do not confuse it with Debussy

Both Debussy and Schoenberg were writing music without a functioning key at the same moment, and people mix them up. The difference is temperament, not harmony. Debussy is slow, quiet, consonant to the ear and built on repeating patterns — the whole-tone and pentatonic scales — that colour a static surface. Schoenberg is agitated, extreme in register and dynamics, and studiously avoids any pattern at all, because a pattern would start to sound like a centre. One is a haze; the other is a scream.

The twelve-tone method, from about 1921

Schoenberg wrote almost nothing between 1915 and 1923. What emerged was a method for building long pieces again.

Fix an order for all twelve notes of the chromatic scale. That ordering is the row or series. The piece then draws its material from that row in four forms:

• Prime — the row as written.
• Inversion — every interval flipped in direction, so a rising third becomes a falling third.
• Retrograde — the row backwards.
• Retrograde inversion — the inversion, backwards.

Each of the four can begin on any of the twelve pitches, giving 48 versions of the same intervallic idea. Because no note recurs until the row has cycled, no pitch gets the repetition it would need to feel like a tonic. That is the whole point: the method guarantees the atonality that free atonality had to achieve by vigilance.

The row is not a theme

This is the mistake almost everyone makes. A row is pre-compositional — a supply of intervals, not a tune. It may be stated melodically, but it is at least as often split between instruments, stacked vertically into chords, or run as several row forms at once. In practice you cannot hear the row, and you are not meant to. Charles Rosen’s point is worth holding on to: the method is a device for coherence, not a style. It tells you how the notes were chosen, and almost nothing about how the piece will sound.

The proof is that Schoenberg poured his rows into eighteenth-century containers — suites, variations, a piano concerto, sonata-form movements with recognisable phrasing and metre.

What it actually sounds like

Ignore the construction and listen for the consequences:

• Chromatic saturation. Every note of the chromatic scale keeps arriving, so nothing sounds like a resting place.
• Wide leaps. Melodic lines jump by sevenths and ninths rather than stepping, often because the composer has spread an interval across registers.
• No cadence, no repetition. Nothing returns in a way you can grasp on first hearing.
• Motivic shapes that recur with altered intervals. You sense a contour coming back while the notes differ — that is inversion or retrograde at work.
• Form carried by rhythm, register and colour. Since the ear cannot follow pitch structure, the audible articulation is texture: a sudden thinning, a change of instrument, a shift of register.

Schoenberg, Berg, Webern

The three are called the Second Viennese School (Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven being the first). They share a method and sound nothing like one another, which makes them a pleasure to discriminate.

Berg is the one who proves that twelve-tone is not a sound. His Violin Concerto of 1935 uses a row built so that it contains triads, and ends by quoting a Bach chorale; the effect is elegiac and unmistakably late-Romantic. Wozzeck is grippingly dramatic and moves in and out of tonal centres at will.

Webern goes the other way, to subtraction. His entire output fits on a few discs. Whole orchestral movements run to a handful of bars at a whisper, with single notes passed from harp to celesta to muted trumpet — Klangfarbenmelodie, tone-colour melody, where the successive timbres do the work a melody would normally do. Silence is load-bearing. If a piece is atonal and tiny and mostly rests, it is Webern.

What came after

After 1945, and especially at the Darmstadt summer courses, the younger generation took Webern rather than Schoenberg as the model and extended the series beyond pitch. In total or integral serialism, rhythm, dynamics and attack are each governed by their own ordering. Messiaen’s Mode de valeurs et d'intensités (1949) lit the fuse; Boulez’s Structures (1952) and early Stockhausen followed.

The sound is the useful part for dating. Schoenberg kept metre, phrasing and classical forms. Total serialism has no pulse you can tap and no dynamic shape — every note seems to arrive at a different volume and length, and the surface is pointillist and apparently random. Atonal plus no rhythm at all means after 1950; atonal with audible phrasing and metre means the Second Viennese School.

The honest note, and the traps

Why is it hard? Because musical memory runs on repetition, a stable reference pitch and predictable metre — and a system explicitly designed to stop any note recurring removes all three. Without expectation there is no sense of going somewhere, which is most of what listeners mean by enjoying music. Saying so is not philistinism. The practical move is to give up on following pitch and follow gesture, register, density and colour instead; on those terms the music becomes vivid rather than forbidding.

Three traps to avoid:

Atonal is not twelve-tone. Anything keyless before about 1921 is free atonality. The method comes later.

Twelve-tone is not a sound. Berg is Romantic; Stravinsky’s serial works of the 1950s are dry and neoclassical. Dallapiccola is lyrical. Method and style are separate questions.

Dissonance dates nothing on its own. Bartók, Ives, Messiaen and Shostakovich can be every bit as crunchy while remaining centred on a pitch — Bartók in particular is often mistaken for atonal, but his music has axes and centres and folk-derived modes. And since the 1960s, atonal gesture has been the standard grammar of film suspense, so a harsh chromatic cluster may simply be a soundtrack.

How to spot it in ten seconds

1. Is there a home note? Hum a bass. If nothing feels like a resting point after twenty seconds, you are in atonal territory, past 1908.
2. Is it agitated or becalmed? Agitated and extreme means Schoenberg’s circle; quiet, slow and pattern-based means Debussy instead.
3. Check the length. Under a minute, mostly silence, single flecks of colour — Webern, and stop there.
4. Check the warmth. Big orchestra, lush textures, audible triads and tonal ghosts inside atonal writing — Berg.
5. Listen for recurring contours with wrong intervals. A shape coming back inverted or backwards is the twelve-tone method audible at its edges, so after 1921.
6. Can you tap a beat? Yes, with real phrasing — Second Viennese. No beat, no dynamic shape, every note a different attack — Darmstadt, after 1950.
7. Is the voice sliding between speech and song? Sprechstimme: Schoenberg from 1912, or a follower.
8. Is one instrument passing single notes to another? Klangfarbenmelodie: Webern, or those who learned from him.
9. Ask whether the dissonance has a centre. Harsh but tethered to a pitch, with folk-ish rhythm, means Bartók or a contemporary, not Vienna.
10. Ask whether it is film music. Atonal gesture without atonal argument is usually a soundtrack, and tells you nothing about 1910.