Pierre Boulez Edition: Schoenberg I

Atonality is music that lacks a tonal center or key. Instead of organizing pitches around a dominant tonic and functional harmony, it treats all twelve chromatic notes as potentially equal, freeing them from the hierarchical relationships that define common‑practice tonality. In practice, atonality avoids cadential pull, conventional resolutions, and long‑range tonal plans. Dissonances are not required to resolve, familiar chords can appear in unfamiliar contexts, and intervallic cells or pitch‑class sets often replace scales and functional progressions as the basic building blocks. The result can sound tense, floating, or radically expressive, depending on the materials and textures the composer chooses.