atonality, in music, the absence of functional harmony as a primary structural element. The reemergence of purely melodic-rhythmic forces as major determinants of musical form in the Expressionist works of Arnold Schoenberg and his school prior to World War I was a logical, perhaps inevitable consequence of the weakening of tonal centres in 19th-century post-Romantic music. By the time of Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, for example, the emphasis on expressive chromaticism had caused successive chords to relate more strongly to each other than to a common tonic firmly established by intermittent harmonic cadences. Eventually, the chromatic scale of 12 equidistant semitones superseded the diatonic scale, the inseparable partner of functional harmony, to the extent that melodic-rhythmic tensions and resolutions took the place of the harmonic cadences and modulations that had determined the structure of Western music for centuries.
Atonality, although well-suited for relatively brief musical utterances of great rhetorical or emotional intensity, proved unable to sustain large-scale musical events. It was in an attempt to resolve this vexing dilemma that Schoenberg devised the method of composing with 12 tones related only to each other, a method predicated on purely polyphonic considerations of the sort that had been largely abandoned during the Classical and Romantic eras but had, by the same token, been typical of pre-tonal and early tonal music.
In practice, the atonality of a composition is relative, for an atonal work may contain fragmentary passages in which tonal centres seem to exist. Schoenberg’s song cycle Pierrot Lunaire (1912) and Alban Berg’s opera Wozzeck (1925) are typical examples of atonal works. See also chromaticism; polytonality; twelve-tone music.