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Maybe this lack could be one of the reasons why the world at large still loves to listen to and sing along with a Puccini aria such as 'Nessun Dorma' from his final opera Turandot (which premièred in 1926), and yet can't hum a single leitmotif from Berg's first opera Wozzeck (which premièred a year before in 1925 and did not employ the 12 tone technique but is, in fact, atonal). Although Wozzeck is brilliantly written (as is Berg's second and final opera Lulu which did mostly employ the 12 tone technique), it seems to lack the essential ingredients found in great and lasting melody-making: universal emotion and real personal 'meaning' and a 'color'.

Most people in the world seem to prefer music that combines melody with harmony that moves according to progressions with a tonal center. There are no famous songs that are keyless. And longer musical compositions without a key center remain unpopular with audiences to this day since they tend to lose direction, sense and meaning. This is analogous to randomly stringing unrelated sentences together minus a central theme.

Yet it seems that there is another musical element that could be more malleable than melody or harmony: timbre. By its very nature, timbre has always been arrived at through experimental or empirical methods. Timbres don't have to follow a set of theoretical rules and strictures in the ways that harmony and melody do. A composer does not have to rely on past practices in order to create new and exciting sounds.

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