The artist could create an infinite number of paintings, but the paintings would be limited to those 12 colors. As a result, according to Heffner, a music education major, most students come to class with a rigid concept of what music should sound like. Just about everything composed during the last 300 years, from pop music and ad jingles to Beethoven, follows the same structural principles.
Western tradition organizes major and minor scales around a central key.
At the start of the 20th century, some musicians began challenging this tradition. Music, like painting, became more abstract and individual. One new type of music that arose was atonality. Atonal music is composed without a key, giving each note in the scale equal importance and allowing the composer to choose the relationship between the tones. It and other novel arrangements have had a hard time gaining acceptance.