In practice, the atonality of a composition is relative, for an atonal work may contain fragmentary passages in which tonal centres seem to exist.
The latter's harmonic idiom – often called atonal – also diverges strongly from Stravinsky's approach, which is essentially modal and hardly further removed from tonality than the work of his Parisian friends Debussy and Ravel.
The election campaign is into its first week, not quite out of the phoney war stage yet, with Thursday's seven-way TV debate promising to be an atonal chorus of evasion and conceit.
Two atonal synthesiser stabs, each from a different keyboard.
Mr Penderecki, a famous composer of atonal works, teaches there too.Despite its sizeable population—some two million in the metropolitan region Katowice had previously lacked a concert hall.
"Wozzeck", which he finished in 1922, is the first full-length opera written in an entirely atonal musical language music without a definite key or tonal centre.
Last season, for example, "Wozzeck", an atonal, 20th-century drama by Alban Berg, an Austrian composer, was the world's 68th most-performed opera, just ahead of Handel's more easily digestible "Guilio Cesare in Egitto".So what can a director, conductor or singer add to an opera that has already been interpreted thousands of times?
Though not as atonal as the work of many of his contemporaries, such as Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg, Bartok's compositions can be heavy-going, combining influences from Hungarian folk, jazz and Arabic music.
Arnold Schoenberg devised a 12-tone scheme of atonal music about a century ago.Mr Ball goes through each component of music in turn to explain how and why it works, using plentiful examples drawn from a refreshingly wide range of different kinds of music, from Bach to the Beatles, and from nursery rhymes to jazz.
Each had fantasised about breaking a sea lane through the isthmus that divides the Bay of Bengal from the Gulf of Siam and connecting India to East AsiaNote makers Elliott Carter was an American composer influenced by atonal forms.
Although "Wozzeck" is arguably the first atonal opera, Berg's underlying romanticism nonetheless emerges in sensuous, lyrical music.For all Mr Mortier's emphasis on the 20th century, some of this year's most exciting productions were of earlier works.
