THE ATONAL TRAIL: A COMMUNICATION
Atonality or Dodecatonalism as a system of musical com–
position is, as everyone knows, a product of Central Europe. As such it
had from the outset the earmarks of a Messianic cult and a determinist
religion. Like the Bauhaus, Gestalt philosophy, Antroposophy, and many
other Central European "currents" of the teens and twenties, it had its
God or Master, its prophets and apostles, its interpretation of history,
its fervent adepts and converts and its no less fervent financial
backers. However, until the late twenties the movement was es–
sentially limited to Central Europe, and only a handful of com–
posers outside of this realm were converted to the Schonbergian
system of musical composition. Schonberg, Berg, Wellecz, and
other Viennese composers, adherents full or in part of the twelve–
tone system of composition, were naturally well known to everyone con–
cerned with new music. Their theories were discussed, their music care–
fully studied.
The ideological conflict between the converts to the twelve-tone
system and the adherents of the principle of tonal or modal composition
raged in musical periodicals
all
over Europe in the twenties. In most
of this controversy the Schonberg adepts centered their attacks against
the work of Igor Stravinsky, whose rejection of any
"sy~atem"
as a
basis for composition quite naturally put him at the opposite pole
of the dodecatonal cult. However, towards the end of the twenties
the debate between tonalists and atonalists subsided and it seemed
that everyone concerned
(not
the "large" public) had thoroughly
understood the principles of atonality and the twelve-tone system. A
few composers adopted them
in
their entirety, most of the others accepted
them only partially (as a further emancipation of dissonance) but every–
one seemed to feel that the problem of atonality was a closed issue.
It was understood to be the last consequence drawn from an evolution of
chordal harmony which had first started somewhere around 1600 (with
the
first
emancipation of dissonance in the works of the early Italian
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