Zwölftonwerbung - Twelve tone commercial

Wow I wish this compilation actually existed

alban arnold....and anton

Cracks me up! ha.

I love the Stravinsky intro

2:03 "Or this tender, loving passage in Alban's unfinished opera, 'Lulu'?"

I think it's subtler than that. The humor is right on the edge, making fun of the entire situation. That's why it's so funny. I almost busted a gut laughing. It is a fact that atonal music is used a lot in soundtracks for horror films.

I feel that atonal music is just too esoteric - the layman can't appreciate it, but people trained with the right theory can certainly dissect it rather easily - Personally, I can enjoy it at times. But I prefer lucidity, at least on the surface.

The masters of this are still, in my opinion, Bach, Mozart, and Brahms. It takes no more than an idiot to appreciate their music, but no less than a well-trained scholar to dissect them. It's music that works whether you can analyze it or not.

"It's music that works whether you can analyze it or not."

You have really gotten to the root of the issue there. Tonality works even if you don't understand how.

I don't know, really - I think Schoenberg's atonality ideas are interesting, but they aren't like previous musical ideas that reshaped composition: The fugue, the sonata, etc. are all forms of development, not tonal density. Schoenberg is the only person to ever lay out a method for creating an exact tonal density, and while it is interesting, I think that limiting ourselves to such a form of tonality is even more constraining than ignoring it completely - though both are counterproductive.

This is really a VERY funny compilation. It's just sad that it echoes the opinion of so many. And I actually DO go around humming Schonberg's (et al) tunes. His music is VERY tuneful, expressive, and often quite (intentionally) humorous as well!