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You're my hero. P.S. I'm religious

Hi Connor! So cool to find you here. It's late now, so I'll wait until tomorrow to write a slightly longer response, but it sounds like you and I are on the same page about a lot of these issues. Some of the best advice I received, indirectly, from a teacher was similar to something you say: "Write what you like!" I have always tried to be honest with myself and write the music that I would like to hear first and foremost. Thanks for your kind words and keep in touch. Yours, Ezra http://www.music-composition.org

:O Ezra! You make an appearance on a forum I used to be a moderator of! Woah! It's Connor, from IU. :D (btw- your opera was awesome, sad I couldn't have been in it.) Yeah, I think that I don't think about these kinds of things anymore. I wish we could transcend terms like atonality. Doesn't it seem like a dated concept? It's just so far behind the aesthetic. But, I think many people are so stuck on the innovations of the time that they can't move past them. YES: The second viennese school was innovative. Great, so now what? They're dead. It's in the past. Where I am right now? I'm not thinking about my place in history. I'm writing what I like. Sometimes my music sounds to me like atonality... sometimes it sounds like it lies perfectly in a key. I almost never set out to write a piece (anymore) as an exercise in tonality or atonality. Every now and then, I will compose "in the style of..." to figure out a puzzle. Like, when I wrote my preludes and fugues for string quartet. But, for the most part, I write to a program of some kind. Sometimes, that program will ask me to write atonally, sometimes, it will ask me to write tonally. Whether or not I am in either convention... I have no clue sometimes. I often think of tonality and atonality as "math". In many ways, tonality has just as much "math" involved as atonality does. Serial composing... and then the careful art of the perfect authentic cadence. If you look at anything I've written, you will see a lack of academic approach. I don't like to approach my music with a purely academic mindset. I never go in thinking: "I want to use a tone row". I just don't do it... I always go in with a sound I want to hear, and I just recreate that sound. Sometimes, it fits within an established aesthetic. Sometimes, it does not. But, always, it does not feel like adhering to the rules of the prescribed philosophies. And, that's how I view them. I think tonality is a philosophy of believing in centricity. It means that there is a hierarchy of sound, and people agree on that hierarchy. I think atonality is a little like communism... it values all sound equally, and does not force a hierarchy in conventional ways. Though, generally secondary parameters play a role in structure (I'm thinking of Berg's free atonal works, where his romantic tendencies make his atonal works sound like german masterpieces of the 19th century). The actual harmonic content is not viewed in a traditional hierarchy. On the other end of the spectrum, think about this... What if tonality and atonality are philosophies... of hierarchy and non-hierarchy. I would probably lie in the tonality circle. I would consider Berg's works to be tonal in that sense, in a similar way that I'd say Peter Grimes is tonal. What is atonal, then? Cage's 4'33", where the traditional pitch content is thrown by the wayside, and we are invited to just experience life as it is. No imposed hierarchy, just experience. I'm merely waxing curious... just thinking and mulling on the topic. But, honestly, it's not an issue that comes up in my compositional process anymore.