nemesis wrote:
> structure, texture, rhythm and color alone don't make good music.  There should
> be harmonic progression.  Coherent harmonic progression.  atonal music fails
> here...

I'll admit that I'm rather surprised that you a consider coherent 
harmonic progression to be a necessary criteria for music to be good. 
That seems to be far too restrictive to me, and I don't understand why a 
harmonic progression would be so important at a fundamental level.  That 
seems rather to me like saying that good poetry should have a coherent 
rhyme pattern.

Where do you place something like the prelude to Das Rheingold, which 
while tonal has essentially no harmonic progression and is essentially a 
work dealing with orchestral texture?  On the other end, what about 
something like Rite of Spring which has a tonal structure, but one which 
takes many more liberties than in traditional classical music?

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