I watched the whole video.

She has very pretty hands! To play all that atonal
music with such facility, she is at least really
good with piano. That she can sing that atonal
music so well is astounding. And her drawing is
amazing: The art she gets in her drawing, e.g.,
the little cup with legs, is surprisingly good; it
looks like she could effortlessly be a famous
cartoonist.

Beyond her talents and skills, her knowledge of
music is amazing.

But, then, as far as I can tell about what she was
intending to say about music, heavily I don't
believe her. It appears to me that somewhere, at
home, at Stony Brook, somewhere, she got a view of
music that throws out the baby and drinks the
bathwater. From what I can understand about what
she is saying, I believe that she is missing most of
what is really important in music. She seems
to have some formality overwhelming reality.

It appeared that one of her main points was that
music before atonality was somehow merely tonal
and, thus, by 1900 or so played out, over with, and
needed a new direction, e.g., atonality. I don't
believe that.

For an analogy, from all I can tell, what she is
saying is that everything that can be said in the
English language has already been said so that, to
say anything new, we need another language. Next,
the content is not really in what is said anyway
but just in what the reader reads into what is said.
So, it's enough just to say random things. So, that
we don't confuse with English, we will say the
random things in a new, undefined language of
gibberish no one has seen before.

Nonsense. We are not anywhere near the limits of
what can be said in English. The bottleneck is
having something to say, not the language to use to
say it.

Well, there's a language in Western music. Here
is a little of it: Pick two keys on a piano that
are right next to each other; it may be that both
keys are white or one is black and the other is
white, but in any case they are next to each other.
Then to a good approximation the fundamental
frequency of the key on the right will be the
twelfth root of 2 times the fundamental frequency of
the key on the left. That frequency ratio is a
semi-tone. A frequency ratio of the sixth root of
2, that is, two semi-tones, is a whole tone. If
start on a note and go up tone, tone, semi-tone,
tone, tone, tone, semi-tone, then have gone up in
frequency by a factor of 2 (interval of an octave)
and have played the notes of the major scale of
the note you started on and ended on -- that note is
called the tonic of that scale. You will be
playing the notes of the major key of that tonic.

Of course for historical reasons, nearly all those
frequency ratios are surprisingly well approximated
by perfect tuning via ratios of small whole
numbers. In particular, as at Google,

2**(7/12) = 1.49830707688

which is close to 3/2 which is 7 semi-tones, called
a perfect fifth, and how the main string
instruments -- violin, viola, cello -- in an
orchestra are tuned.

If you start on the note C and go up the major
scale, then you will play on only the white keys and
will be playing in the key of C major.

If you want to play some simple music, then pick a
note as the tonic, start on that note, play the
other notes in the major scale of that tonic but
avoiding the tonic, but, when want to end, return to
the tonic. That's done so often in Western music
that everyone will quickly detect which note is the
tonic (or one step more advanced, which notes are
candidates for the tonic) and notice that when you
return to the tonic the music has finished something
and maybe just ended. All that is part of the
language of Western music. And there's much more
such language that we have all learned if only by
association from lots of exposure.

But atonality largely discards that language. Then,
someone who knows only English or is writing for
people who know only English, discarding English
essentially stops communications, and that's why
it's super tough to hear any communication in
atonal music. Yes, the music is new and different
but so would be dropping a pile of brittle dishes on
the floor, and in both cases the sound is new only
because before everyone was smart enough to avoid
making such a sound.

For music, yes, it mostly doesn't mean anything
definite, specific, and unambiguous literally.
Mostly. But, of course, in the Sibelius Finlandia
or the R. Strauss Ein Heldenleben it is fairly
unambiguous what is being said, including the
machine gun fire in Finlandia and the personality
of the girl in Ein Heldenleben.

For something still with meaning but more
ambiguous, in the D major section of the Bach
Chaconne for solo violin, there is a lot of use of
repeated notes, especially A and D, three notes or
four notes, and finally some repeated chords.

But what to make of the repetition? One approach is
to regard them as insistent, increasingly so
during the section, underlining the short passages
between the repeated notes, passages that are
similar but with some variation. It could be music
from impassioned speaking, saying much the same
thing over and over, more and more strongly, with
the repeated notes/chords between as insistent
emphasis.

At one point, the music suddenly changes, as if
exhausted from the passion, and plays just some more
consonant major thirds (D and F#, that is, an
interval of two whole tones) with some short
descending passages. Then the drama increases again
with some repeated chords to the climax of the piece
before a D minor section that starts with a confused
catharsis.

So, for an interpretation, the music is from
something intense going on, building up, becoming
insistent, somehow trying to get some resolution
one way or another, finally, with a big effort,
doing so, and then receding to a catharsis.

One view is that the music is screaming out to the
heavens about the intensity of the human spirit.
Some might guess, but I don't see a good fit, is
that the music was a representation of Bach working
to add one more to his family. Either way, it's
passionate music; the closest of anything else I
know of is the Chaconne of Vitali, and it is quite
different. No, I don't find Stravinsky's Le sacre
du printemps close.

There is an old story that composer
Castelnuovo-Tedesco regarded the Bach Chaconne as
the "greatest piece of music ever written". I can
see many issues in interpretation in that music, but
I see nothing that suggests that the level of art in
the music was constrained by tonality.

Net, I don't see that tonal music, even the quite
old version of it Bach used, either inhibited or
exhausted new musical expression.

To understand better, we need to back up from just
keys, tonality, chord progressions, etc. and notice
that heavily music is art as in the classic
definition the communication, interpretation of
human experience, emotion. So, the listener gets a
vicarious emotional experience or sometimes in
particular something that speaks to part of their
life, that is, confirms that others have faced the
same things, or at least similar emotions, thus,
confirming, possibly comfortingly, for the listener
that they are not alone.

When Rostropovich first went to Berlin to play with
von Karajan, for just what was meant in how
Rostropovich started the second movement of the
Dvorák concerto I don't know, but he, von Karajan,
and several soloists in the orchestra seemed to have
the same musical communications in mind, and that
communication speaks effectively and directly to
me about some parts of my life. So, Rostropovich
achieved an effective communication in a universal
language.

With this definition of art and with the essentially
endless range of human experience, emotion, there is
an endless range of music to communicate, interpret,
new music, not written yet, including with tonality
the same as used by any of Vivaldi, Bach, Mozart,
Beethoven, Rossini, Chopin, Mendelssohn, Puccini,
..., Wagner, J. Strauss, R. Strauss, Rachmaninoff,
Stravinsky, and more. Great, new music is no more
limited by tonality than new information is limited
by English; being atonal is no help for good, new
art in music but, like replacing English with
gibberish, a nearly insurmountable obstacle.

There is a lot of quite good art available mostly in
just performance, with very old tonality; can get
plenty of communication, interpretation of human
experience, emotion, awash in passion, pathos,
poignancy, sympathy, empathy, identification, etc.

E.g., there is the Kelly Pickler I Wonder:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rb9mvkxE5Ww

That with her hair, face, and figure, with the right
hair stylist and dress selection, in places she is
able to look a lot like Marilyn Monroe is nearly
irrelevant. Instead, this music is a heart rending
portrayal of a pretty, young woman, who still
regards herself as a "little girl", suffering from
feeling neglected by her mother. It's endearing.
Standard emotional reactions include sympathy,
empathy. Men, in particular, are supposed to feel
protective, but some will see weakness and
dependency and sense an opportunity for an easy
score. And the music works, well. There is no
end to such human experience, emotion to be
interpreted, communicated.

That Kelly Pickler art really is new: Sure, the
tonality is old, really old, and the harmony may be
just a cliche; in tonality we're certainly not
listening to Wagner's "Prelude" to Tristan und
Isolde; still, I assure you from my many stacks of
recorded music from vinyl to CDs and the Internet,
from Vivaldi through Rachmaninoff to the present, as
art that Pickler video is new and at least good.

So, even recent popular music, with no pretensions
at serious music, and using old tonalities and
cliche harmonies, can still be good as art. Net,
it's still quite possible, even in Nashville popular
music, to do good art with old tonalities.

The main point is the art; tonality is not a
limitation; and atonality is no help to better art.