Simon I’d guess the answers in a large way lays in what it is about contemporary classical atonal music (AM) that is becoming a need for you. What it feeds you. The kinds of sensations and states that it takes you to.
More traditional and romantic classical tonal music (TN) is much more often researched when looking to the ways music is processed and the way the experience of it changes us. Exploration into AM and impacts on experience aren’t anywhere near as much studied.
Some of the ideas I’ve come across in the past look to the values of the new atonal music also having value as a novel experience that energetically charges and blasts away at old patterns.
The dissonance is also in cognitive terms experienced as an arousal. It’s lack of resolve creates a different cognitive relationship for us. Some find it exciting, others exhausting, some enjoy the sense of required cognitive mastering of a more conscious grasp on the background on the concept and its story and the underlying idea. To understand it more often requires specific knowledge of the spirit of the times and the lives of the composer and their individual conceptual approach in these newly (de)constructed compositional systems.
For others AM is not accessible itself and can’t be interpreted or extracted in the experience of listening alone as it abstracts rather than more direct telling through narrative or painting a more familiar scene. By AM turning its back on the familiar in an effort of framing new musical language with original forms and intent (so as to create and discover new ways of communicating) it’s underbelly is that when you talk a new language not too many will always be able to understand or connect (or at least connect deeply).
For me in many ways AM is just as much about idea as it is about content. It’s as much about knowing through an understanding and less about just knowing through feeling. Listening to AM I suggest is as every bit an individual an experience as is composing it. The listening reflects the self discovering nature of the concept. In some ways it is as isolating as being born into a new universe created at every turn. It is chaos theory. As comfortable as being ejected off a train without a map or the security of anything known in a country that has an unfamiliar and sensationally charged energetic language. After you get back on the train you may well be unsure what you have just experienced, it may not give you meaning but it definitely gave you experience.
Perhaps more traditional tonal forms of classical music may well simply lead more to shared experiences that recall points and moments and reflect more traditional cycles whereas AM does tend to be more caught in it’s invention and ideas.
From my experiences AM tends to lean to more constant and unexpected stimulation and TM to a cycle of feelings that are more completed as a digestive whole.
It’s a different form of nourishment and sensation. The shock of the new can be compelling but as in everything else in life it must lead somewhere. There is retention, experience and expectation. These temporal juxtapositions expect that things will change.
I hope you get from it what you need and that this is a good state for you though perhaps being locked in any one state of musical experience might ultimately not be ideally sustainable and lead to some loss of sense of the whole. Reason and purpose aren’t exactly the same things. Meaning gives a whole substance that allows for another layer of appreciation. If the meaning has to be consciously or actively discovered to be appreciated it suggests to me an early language rather than a mature one. This newness of the modernists was a cultural revolution and along with the reactionary post moderns a part of an establishing new (young) phase. Nothing stays locked in time. This may be completely appropriate to where you are currently at. Just trust in the way of it and enjoy it all I figure.
Again, thank you for this thought-provoking post.
(To adopt your acronyms, TM = tonal music, AM = atonal music)
To me music is rarely about external "meaning", it is about the music itself, the musical narrative, grounded in themes/melodies or motives/gestures/sounds. When a composer like Mahler, in the "post"-romanticism of his later symphonies, clearly injects detailed meaning from passage to passage by playing with romantic sign posts and at times deconstructing them in trivialism or even mockery, or in an unexpected turn towards darker or threatening moods, I experience this as a fascinated observer, rather than as someone drawn into the emotion myself (even though at times this also happens).
Therefore, I don't see how in general TM is supposed to have more meaning than AM. The primary meaning of music is its structure (how it organizes time), and its *musical* narrative.
I don't experience a lack of resolve in AM. Resolution of dissonance is a pre-20th century concept that simply does not apply to AM. It does this music a disservice to hear it as "unresolved", it is emphatically an autonomous language of its own. Approaching art, or any human body of work, with wrong expectations does it a disservice.
I think in the end it is less about tonal vs. atonal, but about searching vs. affirmative music, or music that always returns to a common ground or starting point. All aspiring classical music (which is not just a "ditty"), when it is well written, is to some extent "searching", since it always looks for the next, surprising variation and phase of development. I hear that searching also in Tchaikovsky's violin concerto, even though it is affirmative also in its constant forward sweep, which is found especially in the first and third movement, but also to some extent in the slow middle movement. Yet some music makes the search its destination. There is little familiarity of returning to structures or moments that had been heard before. AM is often like that, but it does not have to be like that at all. For example, Stockhausen's Kathinkas Gesang (Kathinka's Chant) for flute and accompaniment circles, with constant variation, around the same phrases over and over again, in a purposefully ritualistic manner. I like both, searching and affirmative music; others will feel more comfortable with just the latter. One is not better than the other. Both types of music, when well composed, provide for me, to quote you, "constant and unexpected stimulation".
For me in many ways AM is just as much about idea as it is about content. It’s as much about knowing through an understanding and less about just knowing through feeling.
I think therein lies part of the solution of the puzzle. I always enjoy knowing music through understanding, and not just through feeling, and that is also a reason why both TM and AM have a similar attraction to me.
