Emancipation of the dissonance
Encyclopedia
Arnold Schoenberg
Arnold Schoenberg was an Austrian composer, associated with the expressionist movement in German poetry and art, and leader of the Second Viennese School...
and others, including his pupil Anton Webern
Anton Webern
Anton Webern was an Austrian composer and conductor. He was a member of the Second Viennese School. As a student and significant follower of Arnold Schoenberg, he became one of the best-known exponents of the twelve-tone technique; in addition, his innovations regarding schematic organization of...
. The phrase first appears in Schoenberg's 1926 essay "Opinion or Insight?". It may be described as a metanarrative
Metanarrative
A metanarrative , in critical theory and particularly postmodernism, is an abstract idea that is thought to be a comprehensive explanation of historical experience or knowledge. According to John Stephens, it "is a global or totalizing cultural narrative schema which orders and explains knowledge...
to justify atonality
Atonality
Atonality in its broadest sense describes music that lacks a tonal center, or key. Atonality in this sense usually describes compositions written from about 1908 to the present day where a hierarchy of pitches focusing on a single, central tone is not used, and the notes of the chromatic scale...
. Jim Samson (1977, 146–47) describes:
Composers such as Charles Ives
Charles Ives
Charles Edward Ives was an American modernist composer. He is one of the first American composers of international renown, though Ives' music was largely ignored during his life, and many of his works went unperformed for many years. Over time, Ives came to be regarded as an "American Original"...
, Dane Rudhyar
Dane Rudhyar
Dane Rudhyar , born Daniel Chennevière, was an author, modernist composer and humanistic astrologer. He was the pioneer of modern transpersonal astrology.-Biography:...
, even Duke Ellington
Duke Ellington
Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington was an American composer, pianist, and big band leader. Ellington wrote over 1,000 compositions...
and Lou Harrison
Lou Harrison
Lou Silver Harrison was an American composer. He was a student of Henry Cowell, Arnold Schoenberg, and K. P. H. Notoprojo Lou Silver Harrison (May 14, 1917 – February 2, 2003) was an American composer. He was a student of Henry Cowell, Arnold Schoenberg, and K. P. H. Notoprojo Lou Silver Harrison...
, connected the emancipation of the dissonance with the emancipation of society and humanity. Michael Broyles calls Ives tone-cluster
Tone cluster
A tone cluster is a musical chord comprising at least three consecutive tones in a scale. Prototypical tone clusters are based on the chromatic scale, and are separated by semitones. For instance, three adjacent piano keys struck simultaneously produce a tone cluster...
-rich song "Majority" as, "an incantation, a mystical statement of belief in the masses or the people" (Broyles 1996, 125). Duke Ellington, after playing some of his pieces for a journalist, said, "That's the Negro's life ... Hear that chord! Dissonance is our way of life in America. We are something apart, yet an integral part" (Ellington 1963, 150). Lou Harrison described Carl Ruggles
Carl Ruggles
Charles "Carl" Sprague Ruggles was an American composer of the American Five group. He wrote finely crafted pieces using "dissonant counterpoint", a term coined by Charles Seeger to describe Ruggles' music...
's counterpoint as, "a community of singing lines, living a life of its own, . . . careful not to get ahead or behind in its rhythmic cooperation with the others" (Harrison 1946, 8). Rudhyar gave the subtitle "A New Principle of Musical and Social Organization" to his book Dissonant Harmony, writing, "Dissonant music is thus the music of true and spiritual Democracy; the music of universal brotherhoods; music of Free Souls, not of personalities. It abolishes tonalities, exactly as the real Buddhistic Reformation abolished castes into the Brotherhood of Monks; for Buddhism is nothing but spiritual Democracy" (Rudhyar 1928, 10–11).
Just as the harmonic series
Harmonic series (music)
Pitched musical instruments are often based on an approximate harmonic oscillator such as a string or a column of air, which oscillates at numerous frequencies simultaneously. At these resonant frequencies, waves travel in both directions along the string or air column, reinforcing and canceling...
was and is used as a justification for consonance, such as by Rameau, among others, the harmonic series is often used as physical or psychoacoustic justification for the gradual emancipation of intervals
Interval (music)
In music theory, an interval is a combination of two notes, or the ratio between their frequencies. Two-note combinations are also called dyads...
and chords
Chord (music)
A chord in music is any harmonic set of two–three or more notes that is heard as if sounding simultaneously. These need not actually be played together: arpeggios and broken chords may for many practical and theoretical purposes be understood as chords...
found further and further up the harmonic series over time, such as is argued by Henry Cowell
Henry Cowell
Henry Cowell was an American composer, music theorist, pianist, teacher, publisher, and impresario. His contribution to the world of music was summed up by Virgil Thomson, writing in the early 1950s:...
in defense of his tone cluster
Tone cluster
A tone cluster is a musical chord comprising at least three consecutive tones in a scale. Prototypical tone clusters are based on the chromatic scale, and are separated by semitones. For instance, three adjacent piano keys struck simultaneously produce a tone cluster...
s. Some argue further that they are not dissonances, but consonances higher up the harmonic series and thus more complex. Chailley (1951, 12; cited in Nattiez 1990) gives the following diagram, a specific timeline he proposes:
A 1996 book by Thomas J. Harrison, 1910, the Emancipation of Dissonance, uses Schoenberg's 'revolution' to trace other movements in the arts around that time.
Sources
- Broyles, Michael. 1996. "Charles Ives and the American Democratic Tradition", in Charles Ives and His World, ed. J. Peter Burkholder. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
- Chailley, Jacques. 1951. Traité historique d'analysis musicale. Paris: Leduc.
- Cooper, Paul. 1973. Perspectives in Music Theory: An Historical-Analytical Approach. New York: Dodd, Mead. ISBN 0-396-06752-2.
- Ellington, Duke 1993. "Interview in Los Angeles: On Jump for Joy, Opera, and Dissonance as a 'Way of Life,'" reprinted in The Duke Ellington Reader, ed. Mark Tucker, 150. New York: Oxford University Press.
- Harrison, Lou. 1946. About Carl Ruggles. Yonkers, N.Y.: Oscar Baradinsky at the Alicat Bookshop.
- Harrison, Thomas J. 1996. 1910, the Emancipation of Dissonance. Berkeley: University of California Press.
- Lockspeiser, Edward. 1962. Debussy: His Life and Mind, p.207. ISBN 0304918784 for Vol. 1. cited in Nadeau, Roland (Sep., 1979), "Debussy and the Crisis of Tonality", p.71, Music Educators Journal, Vol. 66, No. 1, pp. 69-73.
- Nattiez, Jean-Jacques. 1990. Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music (Musicologie générale et sémiologue, 1987). Translated by Carolyn Abbate. ISBN 0-691-02714-5.
- Oja, Carol J. 1999. "Dane Rudhyar's Vision of American Dissonance." American Music (Summer): [pages?].
- Rudhyar, Dane. 1928. Dissonant Harmony: A New Principle of Musical and Social Organization. Carmel, California: Hamsa Publications.
- Samson, Jim. 1977. Music in Transition: A Study of Tonal Expansion and Atonality, 1900-1920. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0-393-02193-9.