The proliferation of music, especially of Western Classical, has always been contingent on it’s ability to remain with in a set of complex strictures. The rules of Classical music are many, ranging from the maintenance of common tones in the common practice style to the often complex avoidance of harmonic parallelism. “Good” Classical music–that is, music deemed “good” by the Western bourgeois–has traditionally been music that obeys the elaborate musical code of laws. For the most part, these rules are blindly followed because they are the guiding force for perfectly tonal music. However, it is not until composers like Arnold Schoenberg hit the scene that the entire law-abiding musical institution seems to collapse into a heap of nonsense statutes and ordinances, falling back on collective horror as a method for combating such “anarchy” (Huneker, handout). Though considered a lawless wild man of the musical frontier, Schoenberg simply chose to write and experience music sans convention, which is arguably a more enlightening way to participate in artful noisemaking. Atonality, in this way, is incredibly ideal, as it allows composers and audiences alike to experience the raw capabilities of music in ways that seem to evoke primal, visceral responses. The rules of Western Classical, from this perspective, are suffocating, limiting, and rather conservative. By introducing and semi-popularizing atonality and pantonality (at least making them known), composers like Schoenberg take music back to it’s intense, and at times violent, roots. Whether or not this type of music can be consumed by the general, Western-centric public does not discredit it’s power and revolutionary sound.