Why Post-Tonal Music?

Our first composition project (see Project Description) of MUS 3100 (Intro to Composition) requires students to create a progression of 12-16 chords for piano where the harmonic tension gradually increases to about the two-thirds point, and then gradually decreases to the end. The chords must not be tonal (i.e., they must be post-tonal).

Which begs the question, "why post-tonal?"

Here are some of my reasons:

• The first is that almost every course that involves writing or studying music in the School of Music (1st- and 2nd-year theory, 16th and 18th-century counterpoint, orchestration, aural labs, keyboard harmony, analysis, jazz theory and arranging, etc.) concerns itself with tonal music, and composition is one of the few courses where there is an opportunity to write post-tonal music (electronic music is another). If you don't try writing this kind of music here, it is possible that you would not have the opportunity to do so in any of your other courses!


• The 20th century was period of unprecedented stylistic change and contrast in music history. Graduating without ever having learned 20th-century/post-tonal techniques would be difficult to justify, since it would involve ignoring musical styles and techniques of the past 100+ years.


• Just as we can better understand renaissance music by learning to write 16th-century counterpoint, we can better understand much of the music of the 20th century by learning to write post-tonal music.


• Doing so gives you a broader palette of techniques from which to choose as you proceed on the journey to discovering your own musical voice as a composer.


• Developing your own musical voice as a composer is surprisingly difficult if you limit yourself to composing tonal music. You may wish to debate this point (and I would be happy to engage in such a discussion!), but this has been my experience, based on hearing numerous student compositions over the years. I, like many composers of contemporary classical music, often write music that can be said to be either tonal, or very closely linked to tonal music. I do not believe I would have been able to write music like this, however, had I not undergone a period of many years of studying and composing atonal music. It gives you a different perspective on the nature of tonality, and, ironically, it frees up your thinking as to new possibilities within tonality.


• It works. I've tried this teaching method for 16 years now, and, despite initial resistance or wariness by some students, which is understandable, it has always resulted in students writing music that I considered to be anywhere from pretty good to impressively good; I believe (in part, because students have told me this) that even the most skeptical students would acknowledge that they ended up writing music that exceeded their own expectations. I once gave a paper at an American meeting of fellow composition professors in which I played excerpts from several student works created in the previous semester's MUS3100 course, and my colleagues' responses were unfailingly positive; many told me they were amazed at the quality of the compositions they heard, especially considering that the works they heard represented the first attempts at composing for almost all of the students, and that the students were just random students who chose to take the Introduction to Composition course, not composition majors. It works, so I keep teaching this way!

Hopefully, these reasons make sense to you. I guess the main point is that my job is to help students who take this course become better composers, and at this early stage in the process (this is an introductory-level course), I think it essential to explore atonality in order to discover new sonic possibilities.

Please leave a comment below if you'd like to share your thoughts on this.