LE DÉSORDRE FORMIDABLE

Whenever listening to what is generally termed as “atonal music“ - and I also tend to include the derivates of twelve-tone and serial music - one may happen to think that there is no use for consonant structures within the work. But this - as we know today - never was the idea of the originators of atonal music of the late nineteenth and twentieth century.

For example, when talking about Schönberg’s view on atonal music or his own twelve-tone technique, one has to keep in mind that his intention never was to ban consonance from his music. Instead his aim was - as he called it - „the emancipation of the dissonance“, meaning that he tried to include both dissonance and consonance to the same degree in his work - a view which also his pupil Webern shared with him.

Unfortunately, a lot of composers misunderstood this concept writing music which seemed to lack any sense of structure or system. Some of them imprisoned themselves in a method they thought of as being mandatory. Within the history of atonal composing there is also to be observed a trend towards keeping a distance to recognizable song structures - also omnipresent in the works dealing with the phenomenon of an „open form“ around the mid of the twentieth century - a phenomenon which obviously cannot be followed by the human ear.

With my own work I try to stay true to the principles of the Second Viennese School without neglecting the necessity for useful exceptions to the method. What matters is the song, not the method. So I try to use this technique to create harmonically more open compositions. This work is written for orchestral and synthesized sound and my intention was to put methods of atonal composing into song structures that everyone’s ears can follow. It is so to speak an attempt to make this music more transparent and to showcase the possibilities that one can achieve by composing in the atonal domain.

Perhaps you can extract from this music what adds to your own creativity and mind. It would be more than I can expect to reach with my creation.

Releases:

“Le Désordre Formidable - Atonality For Orchestra And Synthesized Sound” - 2010