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Atonality in its broadest sense is music that lacks a tonal center, or key. [1] Atonality, in this sense, usually describes compositions written from about the early 20th-century to the present day, where a hierarchy of harmonies focusing on a single, central triad is not used, and the notes of the chromatic scale function independently of one another. [2]
Since modulation is defined as a change of tonic (tonality or tonal center), the change between minor and its parallel major or the reverse is technically not a modulation but a change in mode. Major tonic harmony that concludes music in minor contains what is known as a Picardy third .
Tonality is the arrangement of pitches and / or chords of a musical work in a hierarchy of perceived relations, stabilities, attractions, and directionality. In this hierarchy, the single pitch or the root of a triad with the greatest stability in a melody or in its harmony is called the tonic. In this context "stability" approximately means ...
Post-tonal music theory is the set of theories put forward to describe music written outside of, or 'after', the tonal system of the common practice period.It revolves around the idea of 'emancipating dissonance', that is, freeing the structure of music from the familiar harmonic patterns that are derived from natural overtones.
From these lectures, Liszt derived the idea of an onde omnitonique, much like a Schoenbergian tone row, that would become a logical replacement for traditional tonality. For him such a row would be part of the historical process from a "unitonic" (tonality) moved to a "pluritonic" ( polytonality ) and ended in an "omnitonic" ( atonality ...
As tonality began to expand during the last half of the nineteenth century, with new combinations of chords, keys and harmonies being tried, the chromatic scale and chromaticism became more widely used, especially in the works of Richard Wagner, such as the opera "Tristan und Isolde". Increased chromaticism is often cited as one of the main ...
Melodies can be based on a diatonic scale and maintain its tonal characteristics but contain many accidentals, up to all twelve tones of the chromatic scale, such as the opening of Henry Purcell's "Thy Hand, Belinda" from Dido and Aeneas (1689) with figured bass), which features eleven of twelve pitches while chromatically descending by half steps, [1] the missing pitch being sung later.
Thus otonality and utonality can be viewed as extensions of major and minor tonality respectively. However, whereas standard music theory views a minor chord as being built up from the root with a minor third and a perfect fifth , a utonality is viewed as descending from what's normally considered the "fifth" of the chord, [ 9 ] so the ...