Atonal Music Quotes

“Arnold Schönberg, the inventor of atonal music, gave concerts which might not be comprehensible but were obviously important.”
― Eva Ibbotson, The Morning Gift

“If serial music is by nature open form, if serial music is indeed an aleatoric process, then this is the case at the most important level of the musical message - its reception. The single most devastating misunderstanding regarding serialism is exactly at the functioning of apparently dialectical opposites - rationality and irrationality, control and freedom - extremes which, in the serial aesthetic, become as intertwined and as interdependent as the actual musical material. The relation composer-listener is just as important, and begs that we reflect on our relationship to those works, and our discussions of them. Until we do, most debates on serial music, based as they are on a mode of musicological thinking still discretely influenced by thematic thinking - the proposition of a direct relationship between the creation of musical idea and its transmission - will remain fundamentally misjudged.”
― M. J. Grant