In Nazi Germany, atonal music was attacked as "Bolshevik" and labeled as degenerate (Entartete Musik) along with other music produced by enemies of the Nazi regime.
In 1979, the neo-traditional art music composer and founder of the Pan African Orchestra of Ghana, Nana Danso Abiam (b. 1953) introduced chromaticism and atonality in atenteben music with a new fingering mechanism that he had developed at the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, Legon.
Through the use of modulators with frequencies that are non-integer multiples of the carrier signal (i.e. non harmonic), atonal and tonal bell-like and percussive sounds can easily be created.
Though he studied with Vaughan Williams and Stanford at the Royal College, Jacob preferred the more austere Baroque and Classical models to the Romanticism of his peers, and stuck to this aesthetic even in the face of the trends toward atonality and serialism.
Although intelligible at a time when artists like Davis himself were crossing over into the rock/funk field and American "jazz-rock" ensembles such as Blood, Sweat and Tears and The Mothers of Invention espoused brass sections and atonality, the formula was limited and the band expensive to maintain, so it was short-lived and disbanded after two albums.
Sportswriter Leonard Koppett affected the role of classical music critic in 1963 to tweak the song's simplistic composition: “There is little in the score of interest to a mid-20th-century audience. The harmony is traditional; no influences of atonality or polytonality can be found. In fact, it’s sort of un-tonal.”
Arnold Schoenberg and his pupil Anton Webern proposed a theory on the emancipation of the dissonance to help analyse the general trend and, in particular, their own atonal music.
Graettinger's radical polystylistic soundworld, with its polyphonic density and bracing atonality, while drawing on ideas previously explored by the likes of Charles Ives, Igor Stravinsky, Aaron Copland and even Arnold Schoenberg, still remains truly distinctive.