I have some questions for experienced listeners to atonal and duodecaphonic
music.

Coming from a tonal perspective, I am used to reacting to more diatonic
music as calmer and more stable, more chromatic music as more nervous and
unstable.  To me, atonal music sounds like the extreme of chromaticism.  It
seems ideally suited to 20th century notions of dislocation and angst.  I
am thinking about Wozzeck or Lulu, or Schonberg's 'Erwartung'.  The problem
then is - can this music express anything else? (Note that I am theorizing
here - I have very little experience in listening to this kind of music -
that's why I want some starting hints).

Now the question is:  am I reacting to it with inappropriate baggage, so
to speak? Schonberg, as I recall, also wrote a musical comedy (although I
think the comedy was of a particularly brittle 1920's kind, so it doesn't
contradict my supposition).  Now that comedy was not simply atonal, but
in the 12-tone system:  to what extent are these two different kettles
of fish? In 12-tone music it seems to me that we still have chaos from
a conventional harmonic perspective but this is now coupled with a very
strict 'horizontal' order (but is it purely horizontal, or are the rows
organized vertically too?).  Should you hear the tone rows as you
ordinarily hear musical themes? Do the rows and their manipulations 'speak'
or are they just musical patterns, emotional meaning depending on rhythm
and tone-colour? Should you listen purely horizontally for the music's
polyphonic interplay, ignoring the (seemingly) 'harmonic' implications?

If tonality and traditional harmonic concerns have been transcended,
then we by implication would have to listen on another plane as well.  But
Joel Lazar mentioned a 12-tone work that ended up revolving around a major
'key', and I remember reading that Berg's violin concerto has this 'tonal'
tendency too - and moreover that Berg quotes a Karinthian? (from 'Kaernten'
in Austria) popular song at the end of the 1st movement.  Does this mean
that in 12-tone music we can still have oases of calm in a sea of
instability - and that we can have free melodic invention over and above
the rows? Furthermore, are these oases side-effects of the rows themselves,
or can they be deliberately introduced into the music at strategic points?
I can hardly believe that such 'romantic' concerns should suddenly be
inappropriate or irrelevant in this music - after all music is meant to be
listened to, and the ears of Schonberg and Berg were themselves formed in
the context of German musical late romanticism.

Felix Delbruck
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