Can atonal music express true sorrow?
It may surprise some of you to read this question in 2013, but there it is. A somewhat well-known composer’s statement (which I am not sure has been released to a general audience) that includes a claim that atonal music cannot express true joy or true sorrow has started to go around the internet. I may address the question of whether atonal music can express joy in a later post, but I don’t think it’s difficult to answer the question of whether it can express sorrow. Just listen to this great recording of Itzhak Perlman and the Boston Symphony Orchestra playing Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto, which is dedicated “To the Memory of an Angel,” the deceased daughter of his friends, Walter and Alma Gropius (née Schindler, and subsequently married to Gustav Mahler):
OK, sure, it flirts with tonality and comes to a cadence of a kind at the very end, but do you really think the atonal sections do not express real emotion – pain, anger, sorrow, doubt, and finally a kind of acceptance or resignation?
Only one counter-example was really needed to disprove the claim that atonal music cannot express real sorrow, but if you’re not satisfied that the Berg Violin Concerto is either sufficiently expressive or sufficiently atonal (whatever that would mean, considering that the Second Vienna School composers rejected the term in favor of “pantonal,” considering the word “atonal” nilistic or/and nonsensical in implying that there can be music with no relationships between the tones), how about the Elegy for JFK, from Stravinsky’s 12-tone period?
Does the Elegy express anguish the way a crying piece in the romantic style would? No. Actually, the music of Berg and Schoenberg is much closer in style to late romantic music than this work is. I guess it’s really up to you whether you think the Elegy expresses true sorrow, but I think it does. I find that it has a quality of very delicate and tenuous monumentality. That sounds like a contradiction, and to some degree, it is: The Elegy is not a loud wailing but a quiet, sometimes silent, questioning, doubtful, subdued, sad, and thoughtful piece, as befitting a moment when a country was reeling and trying to make sense out of something that seemed senseless and shook their faith in the solidity of the world. Yet the work also is slow, as funeral dirges traditionally are, and very carefully articulated by the vocalist and the three clarinetists. So the short little piece is appropriately contradictory and complex in its deceptively simple ABCDA form, which features a very clear repetition of the first line of text and music at the end. But I do think one of the emotions it expresses, in a subdued, possibly somewhat numb way, is real sorrow.
I think it would be very easy for a group of people to come up with a large number of other atonal works that express real sorrow, so I find it shocking that a highly accomplished and intellectual musician would make this kind of seemingly polemical statement.
How one chooses to compose can be a very personal thing. I certainly have no argument with people who compose tonally, atonally, or both tonally and atonally. But I certainly don’t see where anyone is doing a service to music or to the public by making tendentious statements about the expressive power of atonality. If it doesn’t work for you or for your audiences, don’t use it. There’s no need to defend your choice if you feel comfortable with it, but if you feel impelled to defend yourself anyway, give real, personal reasons, not global claims that are demonstrably false.
panaudio 