I am in the midst of writing a new violin concerto, hopefully one that I will be satisfied enough with to actually finish. But as I write, I am now faced with a whole new demon that I never really thought about before: am I a tonal or atonal composer? I have never considered myself an atonal composer, actually, but as my works incorporate more and more tangents and forays into new harmonic territory, I feel that I may end up losing the ears of those who might enjoy pieces in the style of say my 61st Concerto or 22nd Symphony. At the same time, I have such an ingrained sense of tonal language and conventions that some semblance of tonal center is always persistent in my music, even when engaging in non-diatonic languages.
One of the big questions is this duality of tonal and atonal music. People divide themselves into camps, championing one or the other, but rarely both. Yet the relationship of tonality to atonality is not like a cat and a dog, or a tissue and a paper towel. Tonality is a child, a subset, of atonality: atonality encompasses the full aural experience and possibility, both “harmonious” and “discordant.”
One may consider, then, the organization of sound possibilities in a manner similar to food. Thai cuisine is centered on particular spices, lime, coconut, chiles, and the like. That gives it a particular unifying flavor and richness. It is a subset of every food you could possibly make. No culture in the world dabbles in all possible food, and similarly, no native musical language dabbles in all possible music – it is too vast and “flat” in terms of topology to make sense to human ears. Humans long for a certain organization, a regular system, be it scales, chords, range, or timbre.
Then, every composer is working with a “rule set.” Forget the term “tonality” for now, because that is too contentious. A “rule set” may be a defining scale, such as octatonic or Klezmer or Japanese pentatonic, or it could be a method, such as serialism or pointilism. Every culture came up with a different sensibility in rule sets, but every culture has one. And every composer, tonal or atonal, writes with a particular “rule set” in mind.
In this way, I can understand my music: it is just like tonality, and just like so-called “atonality,” which is not really atonality at all because it always involves a particular understanding of tones. My music focuses on lyricism and shapes in the tones, even when the chords are dissonant or the melodic line is twelve-tone. That is my “rule set,” and it is so because that is what I find provocative and agreeable to hear.
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