Musical dissonance

“ Are not we becoming new-fashioned? Are not we becoming so keenly alive to the intellectual that, unless we watch phrases and periods, theses and antitheses, sequences and cadences, melody against melody, we have no satisfaction in music. Then we run from music to music trying to hear some new thing, until we become almost unbalanced in mind. We become hyper-critical, sensitive to faults, irritable over remissnesses, until those conditions become a part of our disposition, and the musician becomes the crank. That is musical debauchery and I contend that that will shorten the life of any man. ”

“ Debussy makes music the servant of the drama and makes a symphonic use of motives which are not developed formally, but manipulated in an undercurrent of musical thought. He declares melody anti-dramatic, and in recitative with the orchestra there is freedom for individual interpretation. ”

“ I have spoken of certain social conditions which affect music unfavorably. There has been always a certain outcry against music because of its supposed emotionalism. The eye of cold intelligence, seeing the music-lover enthralled by a symphony, raises its lid in icy contempt for such a creature of feeling. The sociologist, observing musical performers, wonders why music seems to affect the appearance and the conduct of some of them so unfavorably. ”

“ For all its golden earthiness, the style of Debussy is the most liquid and impalpable of musical styles. It is forever gliding, gleaming, melting; crystallizing for an instant in some savory phrase, then moving quiveringly onward. It is well-nigh edgeless. It seems to flow through our perceptions as water flows through fingers. The iridescent bubbles that float upon it burst if we but touch them. ”

“ Still more curious is the effect created on him by music he does not like. "One can imagine," he says, "that sensations carried to this degree of violence are rather rare, and that there is a vigorous contrast to them, namely the painful musical effect, producing the contrary of admiration and pleasure. ”

“ Incapable of feeling the austere emotions of art, I begin to read into the musical forms human emotions of terror and mystery, love and hate, and spend the minutes, pleasantly enough, in a world of turbid and inferior feeling. At such times, were the grossest pieces of onomatopoeic representation—the song of a bird, the galloping of horses, the cries of children, or the laughing of demons—to be introduced into the symphony, I should not be offended. ”

“ Bearing all this in mind, it is easy to understand why so much of our modern literature became tainted with the same sound-harshness that had smitten life as a whole. Some writers would not take the trouble to be musical; some maintained that there was no necessity to be melodious; some regarded beauty of sound as synonymous with weakness; others—and these were in the majority—had lost all sense of word-music and the captivating quality of rhythm. ”

“ Even in passages of a merely episodic character, one is struck with the vitality and importance of his inner voices. Dissonance—in the sense in which we understand dissonance to-day—plays a comparatively unimportant part in his technical method. The climax of the second of the "Sea Pieces"—"From a Wandering Iceberg"—marks about as extreme a point of harmonic conflict as he ever touches. Nor has he been profoundly affected by the passion for unbridled chromaticism engendered in modern music by the procedures of Chopin, Liszt, and Wagner. ”

“ Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned. ”

“ Structurally, the music of Debussy is a fabric of exquisite and poignant moments, each full and complete in itself. His wholes exist entirely in their parts, in their atoms. If his phrases, rhythms, lyric impulses, do contribute to the formation of a single thing, they yet are extraordinarily independent and significant in themselves. No chord, no theme, is subordinate. Each one exists for the sake of its own beauty, occupies the universe for an instant, then merges and disappears. ”

“ Dissonance is a cause of rivalry; for a dissonant tone is one that will not fit into a given harmony; yet since it is still a part of the melody, must have its home somewhere, and belongs therefore in another harmony, which, through this tone, is set up in rivalry with the prevailing one. A tone that did not belong to any harmony would not be a dissonance, but a discord,—a tone without meaning musically. Dissonances, like other contrasts, enrich the melody by establishing rival harmonies; discords destroy melodies. ”

“ There is no magic about the community chorus that can suddenly change bad taste to good. Too often we seem here, as in all other activities for popularizing music, to oscillate helplessly between two evils. On the one hand is the crudity of actual taste: the majority prefer ragtime and the musical comedies to folk-songs or the simple classics. On the other hand is the apathy that comes of prescriptions from outsiders: musical activity that is not spontaneous is sterile. ”

“ As I have tried to show in another essay in this volume, the people who despise programme music as a derogation from the high nature and pure origin of the art are labouring under a delusion. Music, they say, ought to be able to stand alone, in splendid isolation as it were; and they regard it as a sign of musical weakness when a [263] composer, associating himself with the literary element of poetry, "calls in to his aid a foreign art," as they express it. ”

“ The dissonance in music embraces all those harmonies which sound harsh to persons accustomed only to elementary chords like the tonic, dominant, and subdominant. They are used most freely in modern operatic music, especially that of Wagner, and have always been employed to express passion of some kind. Palestrina avoided them. ”

“ The pitch being sometimes F, sometimes G, sudden emotion gives us the fifth, C or D, and the strongest emotion the octave, F or G. Thus we have already the following sounds in our first musical scale.
We know how singers slur from one tone to another. It is a fault that caused the fathers of harmony to prohibit what are called hidden fifths in vocal music. The jump from G to C in the above scale fragment would be slurred, for we must remember that the intoning of clear individual sounds was still a novelty to the savage. ”

“ But dissonances contain the real life and progress of music. They arouse, even take by storm our imaginations and shake us out of our equanimity. Consonant chords represent stability, satisfaction and, when over-used, inertia. The genius of the composer is shown in establishing just the right proportion between these two elements; but if there is to be any disproportion let us have too much rather than too little dissonance, for then, at any rate, the music is alive. Since Beethoven the whole development of music as a human language shows the preponderating stress laid on dissonance ”

“ To this ascent and apocatastasis, however, these four manias contribute. And the musical mania, indeed, leads to symphony and harmony, the agitated and disturbed nature of the parts of the soul, which were hurried away to indefiniteness and inaptitude, and were filled with abundant tumult. But the telestic mania causes the soul to be perfect and entire, and prepares it to energize intellectually. For the musical mania alone harmonizes and represses the parts of the soul ”

“ She wants to lead in musical art, to tear up old models, to force a new-old scale upon her half distracted people, and to over-dress the misshapen things in absurd orchestral exaggeration, which so drowns the poor human voice, that the helpless vocal organ is obliged to shout dramatic phrases to a deafened audience, over the countless unrestrained vibrations of a hundred or more madly ringing instruments. What a farce it is! A grand opera presenting a modern girl of Paris, in a modern shirt-waist, yelling common-place remarks to the accompaniment of a monster band! ”

“ But when the tempest of his genius stirred up the depths of the orchestra, so that in almost every bar some old musical rule suffered shipwreck, and the most outrageous impossibilities, the most startling dissonances dashed into the air like spectral water spouts out of the foaming, splashing waves; then indeed must enthusiasm, ecstasy know no bounds, and even the public be transformed into a stormy, raging mass, out of which the thunder of applause should break loose as if with elementary power. ”

“ The result of this irregularity and false quantity is to destroy the rhythm to an extent that often makes it difficult to say whether the music is in duple or triple measure. The musical consequence is the breaking down of symmetrical form, and the tendency is to reduce the organised structure to its component parts. ”

“ The many-voiced tumult becomes a dull roaring in which only the shrill tinkle of the merry-go-round is distinguishable, and when the dance-music, which has been silent so long, commences anew, it drowns everything else with its piercing trumpet-blasts. ”

“ The other sensuous influence of sound is one of the most powerful elements of music, and all musical utterance is involved with and inseparable from it. It consists of repetition, recurrence, periodicity.
Now this repetition may be one of rhythm, tone tint, texture, or colour, a repetition of figure or of pitch. We know that savages, in their incantation ceremonies, keep up a continuous drum beating or chant which, gradually increasing in violence, drives the hearers into such a state of frenzy that physical pain seems no longer to exist for them. ”

“ From the imitation or the prevalence of such a taste there would arise a danger for music—so great that we can imagine none greater —the complete degeneration of the feeling for rhythm, chaos in the place of rhythm. ”

“ Musical appreciation is thus subject to the same variations which make the ordinary experiences of men so diverse. The prophet on fire with righteous indignation and the common scold undergo in anger the same suffusion of blood, the same boiling up of the organs; yet how different in dignity and value are their sentiments! And music, by setting up a certain sympathetic turmoil in the organs, will plunge one man into a selfish opium-dream and will fill another with the rarest, most magnanimous aspirations. ”

“ But let us also consider their external energies on man, and what they outwardly effect about us. The musical mania, therefore, causes us to speak in verse, and to act and be moved rythmically, and to sing in metre, the splendid deeds of divine men, and their virtues and pursuits; and, through these, to discipline our life, in the same manner as the inward manias coharmonize our soul. ”

“ The specific danger which now threatens him is that in some unguarded moment he may give undue importance to music, which would forthwith result in the destruction of the pathos of the speech and the distinctness of the words: while, on the other hand, he always feels himself impelled to musical delivery and to virtuose exhibition of vocal talent. ”

“ Music requires tone and resonance!—I cannot at first lay claim to effectual results, because I have to meet too much opposition. The chief thing is that my present works should prove themselves to be taking a firm footing in musical matters, and should contribute something towards doing away with what is corrupt... ”

“ Even dissonances are used, sparingly but bravely enough to give an idea of the different elements that make music something more than a sweetish impotence. They are vastly different from the horrible trash children are usually brought up on, especially in our American schools, to the almost incurable 316 perversion of their musical tastes. They are also so full of refinement, and of that humor without which children cannot long be held, that they are of complete interest also to "grown-ups," to whom alone the real artistic value of these songs can entirely transpire. ”

“ Perhaps the vice best adapted to illustrate the direct influence of musical culture is cruelty. If you find a boy in the back yard torturing a cat or a dog, or bullying and maltreating his playmates, it will probably do no good to sing or play to him by way of softening his heart. On the contrary, he will probably not appreciate or understand the music at all, and the interruption will only annoy and anger him. ”

“ Every impulse has two aspects: attraction and repulsion. All of us love music in some degree; all of us hate some music; and most of us in the economy of nature are comparatively indifferent and extravagantly wasteful to the role that music might play in our lives. Hatred and indifference to music are important realities in life worthy of serious consideration; but our topic restricts us to the positive side of musical response, the love of music.
THE MUSICAL MEDIUM Organic response. ”

“ And in general the union of the melodic and characteristic features of such music readily incurs the risk of overstepping the finely drawn boundaries of musical beauty, more especially when the intention is to express force, selfishness, evil, impetuosity, and other extremes of exclusive passion of a similar nature. ”

“ Against this concentrated force the discontented minority gives expression to additional energy and resentment, coming to an end in unison. These hints will suffice to show with what a firm mind of the hearers an impression of the perfect freedom of dramatic action, within the limits of strict and simple musical form. ”

“ We find ourselves at the door of the third enclosure—that of the divine life of the mystics. We have to grope timidly, and make sure of every footstep, as we cross the threshold." And when we have crossed the threshold, we find ourselves hungering and thirsting for the more troubled but at any rate broader life we have left behind us; just as the Wagnerian drama, mighty as it is, brings home to us the fact that there are needs of our nature that music cannot satisfy. ”