Review of An Introduction Atonal Music Analysis

This article is a review of book An Introduction Atonal Music Analysis by Amin Honarmand published by University of Tehran in 2014. This book consists of four main chapters. It begins by general issues on analysis of atonal music in chapters one to three and focuses on structure of dodecaphonic music in last chapter. Even though the roots of atonal music is not in Iran, one may doubt why the author has chosen to write a book in this issue rather than translating readily available books written by Western scholars to Persian. It seems that main reason for choosing to write a new text rather than translating is that of needs of Persian student for a simplified source in this issue. Review of this book showed that Honarmand has been somehow successful in this task and the output is clear enough for students who need basic knowledge of music analysis of atonal music.Review of this book also revealed that one may not find all aspects of atonal music in this book and still needs further resources to make a complete analysis of atonal music, particularly in aspects of harmony and orchestration. However, the book perfectly disuses on pitch classes and pitch collectionissues and to a good extend dodecaphonic music analysis. Before reading this book, the reader needs a good knowledge of tonal music and related issues of that kind of music in order to make a better sense of absence of tonality in configuration of atonal music.