Bob K:

>I rather think that the "serial" or "atonal" question could be construed as
>an objective rather than subjective one.  That is, as more than a matter of
>taste.
>
>The deal is this, in a simplified nutshell: The natural progression in ...
>(sometimes to find things are not quite as you left them).

No such "natural" progresion.  You are confusing that which takes advantage
of the way people think, with that which is natural.  Not the same thing at
all.  Women who have had breast augmentation surgery aren't "natural" - but
they attract more visual attention in naked pictures.  Other examples are
probably better, but banality has the advantage of not confusing the
situation.

One can analyze Shakespeare to death, similarly to Goethe, Byron, Milton
and so on without finding any such "natural" progression - some poems and
plays use it, others don't.  Dante's Commedia is one of the most carefully
structured works in Western art, and it does not use this supposedly
natural leave and return principle, instead his wheel image is of hos
fantasy spinning in place alike to the wheel of heavan.  Your final example
- Odysseus.  His story does not start in Ithaca - we meet him in the middle
of the Trojan work in Illiad, and once he gets back to Ithaca, he takes off
again.

Most Gregorian chants don't start on the fundemental either.

The reason "leave and return" turns out to be so useful in Western
Classical music is because it is a successful meta-narrative, and there
are many, many, many tools that have been developed to create the effect
and reinforce it.

>When this element is forcibly removed in art, as in the so-called Second
>Viennese School, some immediate intelligibility is lost.  The similarity to
>what the ear hears usually even today is faded.  Even the most violent/dark
>metal/rap groups don't even come close to straying from tonality; it is too
>intuitive.  (There is atonal rock, too.)

But "intuitive" is not "natural", it merely means "habitual".  This is not
an argument against particular aspects of tonality being natural - merely
that the above is not a proof.

>So I think something is scary and a little inaccessable to un-initiated
>ears about atonal works.

It isn't lack of this rhetoric.  It is along time before Mozart starts
using it in his operas - if it is so bleeding natural, why does one of the
great geniuses of Western Art take a decade of writing operas to figure it
out?

There are, demonstrably, "natural" elements to the construction of
tonality.  But to discover them requires clearing the decks of various
apologias created, largely in response to the challenge of dodecaphony
to tonality, and observing the actual effects and sources of tonalities
functioning.

Stirling S Newberry
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