But it was long enough for him to show forcefully how traditional virtues -- of melodic shape, of contrapuntal interest, of harmonic function -- survived the shock of atonality, and how that shock let loose a new kind of sudden, vivid gesture.
I didn't throw over the expressionistic aspects of atonality.
Of the century's modernist revolutions, Schoenberg's invention of atonality was the most viscerally shocking.
Arnold Schoenberg heard it as a premonition of atonality, a call for freedom from convention.
There are some small answers: the persistence of atonality and robust sexuality in orchestral music; a connection between design and movement that continues to inform innovation in the theatre; the presence of liturgical ritual, gesture and androgyny in rock and roll.
Berg has the reputation of being the "accessible" Schoenbergian, the one who sweetened the bitter pill of atonality.
The only possible meaningful implication -- that Communist regimes were proponents of atonality -- is simply contrary to fact.
In the years during and after the Second World War, film music became jazzier and edgier; David Raksin, Alex North, Leonard Rosenman, and Elmer Bernstein added dissonance, even spells of atonality.
His argument was not so much on behalf of atonality as against tonality: the old order, Schoenberg said, was an artificial construct that had to die.
Thus did Arnold Schoenberg, the inventor of atonality and of twelve-tone composition, become a heroic figure in the postwar years; he had stayed, it seemed, absolutely pure.
