Alright, so most pop music that you hear is modal, not tonal. Modal means that it uses a scale construction that isn't major or melodic minor, and that it doesn't really have any tension other than the tension of the mode, or any resolution except for the way the mode ends... and typically it doesn't end, it just fades out.

Tonal music is constructed by either the hybrid melodic minor scale, or the major scale.

Atonal music has two types - free atonality which usually sounds modal and dodecaphony, which is way out of vogue right now and sort of hovers around modal without quite making a comittment to any scale, and so is truly atonal.

Right now most Art Music being written is freely atonal. I write tonal music. The style of music I write is called ahistoricism, meaning that I interchange old-fashioned devices with newfangled ones in a combination that leaves the trained listener wondering what time period it was written in. If you saw the scores you would know it was 21st Century, but the devices are often Classical in nature.

Ahistoricism was pioneered by Phillip Glass, a fine composer, but Phillip Glass and I differ in that one of my major interests is in form. Rather than building and developing a theme on a free canvas as Glass did, I'm interested in coloring in a form that was produced a long time ago, as well as altering that form to suit my needs, which was a Classical device as well... although we could get into arguments about the Romance period but you guys don't care, a music critic might...

Anyway, what I'm getting at here is that I'm not in the norm for Art Music composers. The use of modality is becoming common in Art Music, sometimes in ways that leave you wondering if it's just pop music, in a way that Andy Warhol can make you wonder if it belongs in a magazine or in a museum. The use of more complex modal systems that imply free atonality is most popular with the critics, and that pretty much leaves people like me getting no commissions and wondering when my next food stamp award will come.

I'll be back in a few hours with something else I'm sure.