ABSTRACT
“Atonal”, that tiresome word, was originally just a journalist’s gibe, probably, like “cubism”. New developments had been taking place in music from the first decade of the century onwards, for which the champions of atonality, not surprisingly, had no positive interpretations to offer. Alois Haba himself caps the series with a thesis of his own which affirms that “each tone can be linked with or related to any other tone: each interval, each chord can be linked with or related to any other interval or chord within any of the possible systems”. The whole “atonal” episode might, therefore, be regarded as a tremendous adventure providing fresh randomness, on a perhaps unprecedented scale, so that a new system of order could grow out of it. In comparison with the highly articulated structure of the diatonic scale, the chromatic scale is invertebrate.
