Atonality: music stripped of its roots

No, I speak not of Blue's roots or Rock and Roll roots, or regressing to anything of the sort. Atonal music is in a league of its own amongst the classical music world in terms of being just plain weird. The music has no tonal anchor to weigh it down, to put every diatonic note and harmony in its proper place. This music is indeed stripped of its plant roots. It relies not on key signature to bring about unity, but rather the relationship between the intervals themselves. There are no regulations on accidentals; sharps and flats can be added at the composer's will. It is a music in which the key to understanding it is being able to detect its subtle structures and patterns, sorta like what everyone should be doing with tonal music, but they refuse not to for some reason. When I first listened to Schoenberg, aka the father of atonal music,'s music, I was bowled over, but not in a good way. I was as confused and womblike as a baby. The noise! was one of pure cacophony. Surely, I thought to myself, this wasn't being passed off as music? It's just so random, and I'm angry because I want the music to express elements of story, and this frankly wasn't delivering. My senses slowly caught up to me though, thankfully. Well, either that or a careful probing of the sheet music that caused me to second-guess and flat out reiterate my opinion. I saw patterns, and I heard them too. I shifted my brain's perspective as well, in which it interpreted "dissonances" not as such, but as pleasing to the ear as consonances, for atonality is almost zen-like, and the listener should adopt a purely objective approach when sampling any music of this type. A good introduction to this music would be Berg's Violin Concerto. It's interesting in that while it is 12-tone in layout, (a branch of atonality) it still has a faintly harmonic dependence, which can be heard especially well in key sections.