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From the New York Times:

TRENTON — Gov. Jon S. Corzine signed into law a measure repealing New Jersey’s death penalty on Monday, making the state the first in a generation to abolish capital punishment.

I sincerely hope more states will follow suit, and that Florida will some day be among those which do not practice state-sponsored murder.

For the record, reason number one to love New Jersey is this.

Over at his blog, Alex Ross has declared December 17 to be Worldwide Atonality Day, pointing out that a draft of a song entitled “Ich darf nicht dankend” from Schoenberg’s Zwei Lieder für Gesang und Klavier op. 14 was completed a hundred years ago today, “music in which conventional tonal harmonies grow exceedingly scarce”.

Debate over the use of the word “atonal” aside, this is an important occasion, as it marks a moment in which serious music took a final dramatic shift from an established harmonic structure that had dominated music for hundreds of years. After Schoenberg, composers of art music had a choice to make: would they follow Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School and try and create a new aural landscape which seemed to offer so much promise to those willing to do the work, or would they continue along the well-established path made by all the Romantics and their forebears, or even retreat a little? Obviously this is was a bid decision, and some composers–Stravinsky, for instance–tried a variety of styles.

As much as I know understanding of, and repeated exposure to atonal music rewards listeners, there is no doubt that Webern was profoundly wrong in his prediction that everyone would be whistling 12-tone pieces in the streets by the end of the 20th Century. That day, I predict, will never come, for the simple reason that people like big tunes. As I listen today to Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, which is beautiful in its own way, I wonder, has any tone-row ever compared in popularity to this work from 1924:

No. Wozzeck, premiered just a year later, is the better piece, but it is clear to me that, in the end, tonality has won, and always will win with audiences.