"atonal music is music in which the person who is using the word cannot hear tonal centers". One difficulty is that even an otherwise "atonal" work, tonality "by assertion" is normally heard on the thematic or linear level. That is, centricity may be established through the repetition of a central pitch or from emphasis by means of instrumentation, register, rhythmic elongation, or metric accent. Criticism of atonal music Swiss conductor, composer, and musical philosopher Ernest Ansermet, a critic of atonal music, wrote extensively on this in the book Les fondements de la musique dans la conscience humaine (The Foundations of Music in Human Consciousness), where he argued that the classical musical language was a precondition for musical expression with its clear, harmonious structures. Ansermet argued that a tone system can only lead to a uniform perception of music if it is deduced from just a single interval. For Ansermet this interval is the fifth. See also Emancipation of the dissonance Jazz improvisation Klangfarbenmelodie Neue Musik Noise music List of atonal compositions References Cited sources Further reading Beach, David (ed.). 1983. "Schenkerian Analysis and Post-Tonal Music", Aspects of Schenkerian Theory. New Haven: Yale University Press. Dahlhaus, Carl. 1966. "Ansermets Polemik gegen Schönberg." Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 127, no. 5:179–183. Forte, Allen. 1963. "Context and Continuity in an Atonal Work: A Set-Theoretic Approach". Perspectives of New Music 1, no. 2 (Spring): 72–82. Forte, Allen. 1964. "A Theory of Set-Complexes for Music". Journal of Music Theory 8, no. 2 (Winter): 136–183. Forte, Allen. 1965. "The Domain and Relations of Set-Complex Theory". Journal of Music Theory 9, no. 1 (Spring): 173–180. Forte, Allen. 1972. Sets and Nonsets in Schoenberg's Atonal Music. Perspectives of New Music 11, no. 1 (Fall–Winter): 43–64. Forte, Allen. 1978a. The Harmonic Organization of The Rite of Spring. New Haven : Yale University Press. . Forte, Allen. 1978b. "Schoenberg's Creative Evolution: The Path to Atonality". The Musical Quarterly 64, no. 2 (April): 133–176. Forte, Allen. 1980. "Aspects of Rhythm in Webern's Atonal Music". Music Theory Spectrum 2:90–109. Forte, Allen. 1998. The Atonal Music of Anton Webern. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. . Forte, Allen, and Roy Travis. 1974. "Analysis Symposium: Webern, Orchestral Pieces (1913): Movement I ('Bewegt')". Journal of Music Theory 18, no. 1 (Spring, pp. 2–43. Krausz, Michael. 1984. "The Tonal and the Foundational: Ansermet on Stravinsky". The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 42:383–386. Krenek, Ernst. 1953.