On Feb 5, 2005, at 7:02 PM, David W. Fenton wrote:
On 5 Feb 2005 at 9:56, Christopher Smith wrote:
On Feb 4, 2005, at 7:06 PM, David W. Fenton wrote:
On 4 Feb 2005 at 8:23, Christopher Smith wrote:
Right. No dissonance, no consonance. It's not about that any more.
You have correctly understood, grasshopper!
Well, then, you disagree with Andrew, who said (still included in the quotes above):
On 3 Feb 2005 at 12:07, Andrew Stiller wrote:In any event, "emancipation of the dissonance" certainly does not imply elimination of the consonant.
I was disagreeing with that, as not resolving dissonance means it's no different from consonance, which means there is no longer a distinction that can be maintained except by external reference to rules that are not themselves demonstrated in the way the music itself behaves.
It looks like all of us are in agreement from where I'm sitting. Harmonic dissonance and consonance may be quantifiable and measurable (ratios of frequencies and all that) but there are other factors affecting how we react to it, such as culture, experience, and context.
My point is simply that we can explain why "consonant" intervals (Q: why do these discussions always ignore chords of 3, 4, 5, 6 notes? A: because the simplistic explanation breaks down when you get away from pure 2-note intervals)
That's just wrong. I'm sorry, but the reason we (I, that is to say) are confining the discussion to dyads is because it's easier to explain. Nothing breaks down at all when you add notes, and there is plenty of support for formulas calculating harmonic dissonance according to interval content, taking octaves and inversions into account, starting with Hindemith. I have my own (simplified) methods, because I find dicking around with spreadsheets, calculators, and the like contrary to the frame of mind I need to compose well, and the human ear (mine anyway) is not discerning enough to be bothered by the hair-splitting decisions made that way.
differ from "dissonant" (more shared lower harmonics), but what happens after that is culturally (and contextually) defined. That is, different musical cultures respond to the acoustic characteristics of the dyads differently.
Of course I agree with you there. I just said that. For example, my world feels comfortable when the harmony contains at least 4 notes. I learned that, at the expense of a lot of time and critical listening.
And when you eliminate the concept of dissonance in the musical text (i.e., the dissonances are never resolved), then you no longer have a distinction between the two types of intervals beyond the culturally defined meanings the listeners bring to the table.
That's the point of atonalism, to remove the gravitational tendencies associated with the intervals. Everyone who comes to atonal music from tonal music has to check their tonal baggage at the door, or else they concentrate on the wrong things and miss enormous parts of the music, or are just confused.
Sure, it happened to me at first. Listening to Webern's piano music (can't remember the opus number) I kept hearing three-note jazz grips (a common way of voicing jazz chords) that indicated dominant 13th chord and minor 13th chords (for the serial guys, they were 0,1,6 cells in various inversions, voiced as tritone-fourth and fourth-tritone). I couldn't get away from that at first, and the music just confused me. Once I was able to hear them as divorced from a key (in tonal free-fall) it sounded a lot more settled and "normal" to me.
Chrisotpher
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