10/11/25: Analysis Series #2 – The Need-To-Know About Harmony: Tonality vs. Atonality
- john koenig
- Oct 11
- 3 min read
Updated: Oct 18
In the words of Ace Ventura, Pet Detective, “Alllllrighty then.” Here we go, the first of my need-to-know posts on music fundamentals. I figured harmony, the sounds musical pitches make when they are heard all together instead of one by one, might be the hardest, so why not start there. Discussions of harmony seek to describe ways that music is organized, why it makes sense or is cohesive when we hear it. Harmony is like the grammar of music. Therefore, we should start with three basic ground rules for understanding how music is constructed:
1. Most music is made of pitches. Not all of it, but that’s not need-to-know. This is like saying that most poetry is made up of words.
2. There are broadly two ways the pitches and their resulting harmonies can be organized: according to a system of scales and chords, and according to some other system. This is like poetry that adheres to grammatical structures and poetry (like e. e. cummings) that doesn’t.
3. Commonly, music does not subscribe neatly to one or the other system. Therefore, a comfortability with both systems is necessary. Some modern poetry, for example, uses clear sentences with proper grammar and structure in the same poem with nonsense sounds and fragments.
The system that organizes harmonies using scales and chords is normally called the “tonal system.” In tonality, scales and keys are like worlds in which an entire piece of music lives. Composers travel between the worlds, but they almost always return home. Explaining how they travel and return, the paths they take to create a journey in a piece of music, is the realm of tonal analysis. There are many different worlds, but we don’t need to know a lot about that yet. What we do need to know is that the name of the home world in any piece, the home harmony, is the “tonic,” and always returning to the tonic is very important in tonal music. We must always go back home, and our experiences away from home normally relate to home.
However, some other composers are more free-wheeling, more bohemian, less constrained by the rules of tonality. The systems that arose to explain this type are normally referred to as “atonal” systems. There are numerous different atonal systems, but they all seek to explain music that doesn’t fit neatly into tonal analysis. The work of atonal theorists is normally traced back to the earliest deviants from the tonal system, Arnold Schoenberg and his students Anton Webern and Alban Berg (the so-called “Second Viennese School” of composers). Their atonal system, the twelve-tone method, sought to liberate music from a slavish obedience to a tonic harmony, from a musical home world, and to establish equality of all pitches and harmonies. The result, on a larger scale, was to create space for composers to write music that is not tied to a tonal home world. Most of the other atonal music and the resulting systems to explain it are directly connected to the work of the Second Viennese School.
These two analytical poles, the tonal and atonal, are the musical equivalent of quantum theory and special relativity in physics. They are both good at analyzing harmonies in their own realms, but it can be tricky to get them to play nicely together in the musical sandbox. We will try later, but for now, this is all we need to discuss about how harmony is organized and explained. Obviously, there’s a TON more we need to cover, and nothing is as simple as I’ve explained it here, but this will get us started, and we will go slow! Many times, these different systems, tonal and atonal, are grossly misunderstood. Keeping things simple and then letting the music speak for itself is the way to go. Below, find some recordings of music that operates in predictably tonal ways, that is text-book atonal, and that exists somewhere in the middle. I’ll explain these pieces in more detail later, but for now, just enjoy!
W. A. Mozart, Theme from 12 Variations on “Ah vous dirai-je, Maman”, Daniel Barrenboim, piano:
Arnold Schoenberg, Praeludium from Suite for Piano, op. 25, Glenn Gould, piano
Chappell Roan, “Kaleidoscope” from Rise and Fall of a Midwestern Princess
Philip Glass, “Part 1” from Music in Twelve Parts
Joni Mitchell, “Woodstock” from Ladies of the Canyon
Adolphus Hailstork, American Guernica, University of Cincinnati College Conservatory of Music Wind Ensemble, Kevin Michael Holzman, conductor
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