2020-10-13
Consonance and dissonance
It has never been easy being a composer. It may be fair to say that, in contemporary American culture, it is even harder than usual. There is relatively little support or knowledge of your craft; the only money making venues for creating new music are popular applications like film, musical theater, pop styles, video and computer games. Even then, luck and insider knowledge frequently trumps talent in terms of making a living. A rather bleak prospect!
Then there is the question of dissonance.
Consonance is prized throughout all world music. In simplest terms, consonance is an acoustical phenomenon wherein there is a prevalence of certain ratios between tones. The ratios of 1:2, 2:3, 3:4, 4:5, 5:6 define mathematically the pairs of frequencies or sounds that we consider "consonant". (The term consonant comes from the Latin con + sonare, to sound together.) Mind you, this is a >gross< oversimplification of what is going on here. When I started to think about how to boil this topic down to a little blog entry, I realized quickly one could write (and many, many have!) a large tome on the topic. Let's just say that "tonal" music, i.e. overwhelmingly consonant music, is what the vast majority of people recognize as "music", and their experience with music that goes into dissonant (i.e. not consonant) combinations of sounds is limited.
For decades, before this cursed pandemic landed on the world, our family has enjoyed the miraculous playing of the Boston Symphony Orchestra about a half dozen times a year. Since the mid-80's we held a subscription for some seats that I dearly loved. I could literally read the cello parts on the stands below me, that's how close we were. Astonishing things happened on that stage every time we attended.
Without fail, however, some part of the evening's conversation would touch on the contemporary music that is often programmed by the BSO. "Sounds awful!"; "I didn't pay all this money to listen to that!"; "Can't we just have another Brahms symphony?!" is what I often heard around us. Thankfully my dad, who simply loved these outings, took a more thoughtful approach. He was always willing to look for the details in a sonically challenging new score that spoke to him. But for the rest of the house it was, and is, a tough sell.
I would often engage in conversations about the new works with concertgoers. If attendees knew that I was a pianist, organist, composer and teacher they would ask me why they should make time for such contemporary assaults on their sensibilities. Over time, I learned to answer their complaints with a question. I asked them if they preferred that their visual arts be only consonant color compositions on happy themes... or if they would only read literature that had no horror, strife or tragedy... or if they just wanted a steady diet of triumphant Disney princesses when they watched cinema. Invariably, people (at least the great majority) would say no. They recognized that art needs to include the ugly, the harsh, the somber, the jarring to tell the full story of the human experience. Should we ask John Corigliano to tell the harrowing story of the AIDS epidemic with pleasant C major I-IV-V-I progressions? Should we ask Dmitri Shostakovich to express his terror of life in Stalinist Russia with only pink, green and blue pastels? Could Charles Ives describe the eerie atmosphere of Central Park, New York with only pretty major triads? Could Olivier Messiaen describe the foundational terror of experiencing the divine in his organ music by sticking to the "nice" harmonies?
I don't think so.
Our lives are challenging enough right now without criticizing fellow listeners if they prefer the comfortable, the predictable and the easy to understand. We do, however, in painting the much greater picture of existence on this planet, need to make room for the <entire> artistic pallet that is available to our contemporary composers. I hope you will take time to accept consonance AND dissonance as the yin and yang, the black and white, the light and the dark of musical possibilities. Those complex messages written to us all using the whole musical pallet might actually help us unpack this chaotic existence a bit more. You will have to get out of the "easy chair" that Charles Ives derided, though!
If you have more questions about this topic, don't hesitate to contact me and we can chat.
K
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