Thank you for your explanation.

I understand what you're saying about undercutting expectations. In my opinion that's one of the main factors in good tonal music. What I don't understand is how that works in atonal music. How can you undercut an expectation if you don't know what to expect? If you're hearing computer generated clicks and buzzes rather than pitches, how can you expect anything at all?

Our impressions of conflict and resolution are based on the idea that certain sounds are more final than others, more safe. The tonal consonances are not arbitrary, but based on a variety of factors including the biological processes in the inner ear. Even in serialist music (tone rows) conflict and resolution are largely based on pitch relationships and tonal consonances, though these may work on different levels (such as the resolution from a chromatic subset to a diatonic cluster). I suppose you could resolve a chainsaw to mooing cows, and on a very fundamental level that constitutes a conflict-resolution progression, but on a very unsubtle level. (Has anyone done that, by the way? I mean, not necessarily chainsaws to cows, but unsafe sounds to safe sounds. Would be interesting to hear).

I suppose that's another reason I prefer tonal music. Tonal music can be extremely subtle, because it's had thousands of years to evolve, so that every note, every dynamic, every relationship interacts on a psychological level with every other piece of music the listener has heard. This allows some amazingly complex progressions, much more complex than simply sudden loud sounds (which is what I meant by dynamic contrast, by the way).

According to my friends the mediocre composers (people do commission their music, so they can't be THAT bad) they feel that every piece of music they write must be completely new and different from everything else ever written, by them or anyone else. That makes these subtle relationships a bit harder.

So I'm not trying to disparage your taste in music, but I do think that tonality has greater, if not exclusive, power to inspire emotion even in non-musical people. You see it every day, people crying at the end of movies, not really knowing why. Can atonal music do that? So it is stimulating to those who have studied it, or spent a lot of time with it, but can it make every-day people cry? Sometimes I wonder if modern art music is even really music, or if it is some entirely different sound-based art form--not worse, just different.