View Single Post
  #13  
Old Sep 30, 2012, 11:04 AM
Xenofan 29A Xenofan 29A is offline
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Jan 2009
Posts: 609
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by Blitz Lunar View Post
Yeah there's a lot of sticking on bass notes, and semitonal transpositions/chromatic movement, so it definitely doesn't stay in any one place and it probably is impossible to really say these songs are in a specific key signature. I guess it's straddling the line between atonal and tonal. I might not have heard anything that's definitively called atonal so I might not know what to look for, but if there is anything more atonal in the stricter sense I'd be interested in hearing it. Also need to find more composers who write this kind of thing... all the composers listed (Takenouchi, Matsuo, Fukuda, Hanzawa) specialise in this kind of thing.
In my mind, rather than a strict line between the two, there's a scale, and there's very little music written nowadays that doesn't subvert traditional, function-based tonality in some way or other (pop and rock contain lots of unresolved non-chord tones, for instance). Add to that the fact that writing "pure" atonality would require that one constantly use the entire chromatic scale, without emphasizing any pitch, and you will find that there is almost nothing that has been written that fits that extreme end of the spectrum. I, personally, can hear most "atonal" music leaning towards one pitch or another (if not a "key"), and I think that most composers would as well, at least subconsciously.

I can't find a Youtube link to them, but the "Impulsive Mind" tracks on Junya Nakano's Another Mind Soundtrack (all based on the same theme) are about as purely atonal as you can get. Some of the stuff in Dewprism and FFX he wrote is also atonal.

Also, some of Motoi Sakuraba's work is pretty close, at least.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PnVekEXJfk
Reply With Quote