Recommend some Atonal Music

I was asked to recommend some atonal music.

The perpetrator of the request was a large white canine, approximately 6 foot 5 and weighing 120 pounds, prominent belly, with sagging jowls and red hair. I heard him say his destination was "sometimes". On foot.



This first version is off the top of my head only! Maybe to be followed by revised and amended list.

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Let's begin before atonality, and cover the transition.

Heh. Bach. Some fugues are so chromatic that they're almost atonal

Mozart -- Dissonance quartet intro, fugue in Jupiter, other chromatic moments, multiple bands at once in Don G.

Wagner
Bruckner
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Mahler -- last works verge on atonality at times
Hugo Wolf -- so chromatic and extreme that he's almost atonal

Schoenberg 1 -- Up to Gurrelieder

(but not Liszt, who was always a show-off)

Scriabin, his piano music but not his orchestral music, which sounds bombastic

Szymanowski wrote the orchestral music that Scriabin seemed to be going for,
and it too is often extremely bombastic. Wagner with his silk underwear removed, plunged into vast panerotic orgies. Sometimes magic, sometimes overwritten. Amphibious -- half in, half out.

Shostakovich -- the preludes and fugues for piano, the string quartets (mostly astringent and elusive but very good and very unique)

Sibelius

Not Max Reger, who is merely overstuffed, overelaborate, like a lesser William James


Ives tonal

Bartok tonal

Stravinsky tonal

Samuel Barber tonal

Copland tonal

Messiaen tonal (maybe one piece out of four or five)

Carter tonal -- imo never had the ear of a Copland or an Ives, but had a sense of design and a work-ethic. Many of his early pieces are sort-of tonal.


Brits: Tippett, B. Britten, Walton
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(Atonal Side, or composer's atonal)

Schoenberg atonal
Berg (both Berg and Webern apprenticed with tonal works)
Webern

Ives atonal

Bartok atonal

Stravinsky atonal

Samuel Barber atonal

Carter atonal -- Variations for Orch. more accessible than Piano Concerto


Varese


Dallopiccola

Peter Lieberson

Mario Davidovsky

Boulez -- try Repons, other pieces from this (fairly late) period


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Rock and Jazz

The canine individual already knows these cats

Zappa
Eric Kloss
Pat Martino
Miles Davis
Coltrane
Mcoy Tyner
Jarrett
Jaki Byard
Hermeto

some recent fave pianists who can play out if they choose: Billy Childs, Stephen Scott,


Heh. Bill Evans. Give the man enough cocaine and enough chord changes, and he could approach atonality through sheer gabbiness

Hiromi (just so that varwoche doesn't have to så¥ it)

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