The Second School of Vienna etablished and organized the atonal idiom and its main structure of compositional possibilities.
Atonal music and atonal techniques are featured in one of the most influential games and used by influential composers, sometimes being the whole idiom of the soundtrack :
Silent Hill,
Dead Espace,
Bloodborne,
The Legend of Zelda (Majoras Mask),
Wizardry .
A key difference to understand is that this music uses atonal techniques as “mood techniques”, different than those of composers like Schoenberg: these composers searched for the so called absolute music.
It is interesting to notice how the culture outside of classical music absorbed elements of this “absolute music” and made them its own. This happens probably because the original pieces were already pieces of music whose mood the composers ignored. But in other hand it is very incorrect to associate atonal exclusively with horror, as if it were not possible to capture other nuances. It looks that the movement of the film noir played a decisive role in the manufacturing of these negative associations. But it is also true that something in this musical technique was objective enought to trigger a Bernhard Hermann into using some of these sounds in order to convey the atmosphere of a film noir movie. There are many nuances not only inside of the atonal universe to be considered, but also in the reception of this universe into game music and film.
Was atonal music already programatic music without the composers of this genre being aware of it, while selling it as “absolute music” or “serious music”?
What do you think?