Atonality describes music that does not conform to the system of tonal hierarchies, which characterizes the sound of classical European music between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Not only does it not conform to the common practice of this particular period, but it is noticeably divorced from the acoustical underpinnings of music going back as far as the scale systems of ancient Greece. Atonality usually describes compositions written from about 1923 to the present day, where the hierarchy of tonal centers, in some cases, may not be 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.

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, Béla Bartók, 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.

History of atonality

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More on [ Atonality ]

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