There are people who demand beauty, calm, and harmony in music – a demand that is perfectly understandable. I am talking about classical music, leaving other “musics” aside just now.
I often hear people say, “When I go to a concert, I like to have the music wash over me. It relaxes me, takes my cares away. It settles me down.” They speak of music almost as if it were a sedative.
Dissonance, on the other hand, is often disturbing. It prickles and piques, rather than soothes. Harmony is a crucial part of music, obviously. But disharmony, a.k.a. dissonance, is too. It has been embedded in music from the beginning.
The works of Bach are loaded with dissonance. Typically, he uses it to create tension and then gives us the resolution – the return to harmony.
For many generations, there has been a joke, which goes something like this: An old musician is lying in bed, ill. His daughter wants to get him out of bed. She goes to a nearby piano and plays an unresolved chord, over and over. Unable to take it anymore, the old man rises from bed, staggers to the piano, and resolves the chord.
Mozart wrote a string quartet dubbed “Dissonance.” He begins with an A-flat–major chord, which he builds note by note – until he lays an A natural on top of it. Dissonance. There is no tool of which Mozart would not avail himself.
So, dissonance, or disharmony, we have always had with us. But there came a time, in the twentieth century, when dissonance prevailed, to the exclusion, even the derision, of other tools. Dissonance was not so much a tool as the whole box.
Ned Rorem spoke of “the serial killers.” Rorem, an American born in 1923, was a composer thought of as “old-fashioned,” in that he continued the tradition of beauty, especially in art songs (of which he wrote about five hundred).
Maybe we could pause to state a simple truth: Beauty is in the eye, or the ear, of the beholder, or hearer.
What did Rorem mean by “serial killers”? He was referring to the practitioners of serialism, which includes the twelve-tone method, which was pioneered by Arnold Schoenberg, that Vienna-born genius (1874–1951).
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