There are several offshoots of the idea of atonality in music. In the 20th century, composers embraced the idea of nonconformity in musical composition and invented many new and different ways of creating music in nontraditional ways. The music they were writing was a direct reflection of the turmoil of how they felt about society at the time, and since 20th century America was a time of turmoil and many dramatic events, musical composition went in many different directions and new styles were explored. Atonality shows the disillusionment that was a part of society and the rejection of conformity and establishment. There were several times of war in the 1900s, and composers portrayed peoples unhappiness and confusedness through the strange formations of melodies and harmonies in their compositions.

12-tone technique:

The idea of a 12-tone, or chromaticism, was first established by composer Arnold Schoenberg in 1924. His earlier compositions had served as preparation for the total loss of a sense of tonality and his work, The Suite for Piano. This idea of chromaticism embraced a new kind of composition where each note was treated equally without a central key. All previous classical music had been centered around one key (based on a scale with a certain number of sharps or flats) that would provide possibilities in terms of melodies, harmonies, chords and resolution. Without the need for any kind of resolution, atonal music reflected the disillusionment and sense of being lost as America went in and out of war times, depressions and times of flourishing.



Chance Music:

This new style of music was based around the idea that each performance of a piece should be completely different from each other. The composer would assign values in time, usually seconds, where different instruments in the performing group would be given a vague outline of what to be playing while leaving the rhythm, tempo, dynamics and other things of that sort up to the performer to create a certain kind of environment. Chance music (also called aleatoric music) represents a total disconnect from any kind of specific form of composition and redefines the purpose of music. This kind of music does not tell a story through series of melodic lines with chords that all resolve to a tonic, but rather a story through a series of disillusioned and blurry images/environments. Indeterminacy is an even more extreme form of chance music- giving almost no musical structure or form to the composition. Again, people in society were confused about what to believe in, mistrusted authority, and began to go against the conforming lifestyle of earlier America.



Polytonality:

Polytonality is another form of atonality, that is kind of either considered similar in nature or completely opposite. Instead of having no key, it has many keys all stacked together. So there is some structure of certain chords and lines coming together, but there are so many of them going on at the same time that the effect is still the same as if there was no central key. Chords were the result of a musical line being stacked together, so instead of playing it as a line, it would be played at one instant as a chord. This is also responsible for just creating a certain desired mood without real structure, but it goes to the opposite extreme of atonality. There were so many different things going on in the 1900s and so many new ideas and systems of belief that this represents the confused state of mind that many people of the time period had when trying to sort out their own lives and ideals. People were constantly being bombarded by very different concepts all at the same time without being given any kind of chance to regroup, make sense, or come to a real resolution, just like in the musical composition.