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 old pal Tom Allen (former fellow bass trombonist), who does a morning radio show on CBC, called this the "noise factor." If we hear something that goes beyond what we expect, then it is "noise" to us. If it doesn't go far enough, then it is boring. The definition of dissonance has changed over time, in that we accept more "noise" than listeners did a century ago. Some of us today accept more or less noise than other listeners do. We all want SOME noise, otherwise life is boring.
A funny illustrative story about noise and form:
I was in a recording studio some time back, recording some (what I thought was modern, high-energy) jazz, and at the end of our session we were listening to the playback when the engineer for the next session came in. He breathed a deep sigh, and said, "Ah, how relaxing! Quite a difference from what I'm working on next!" We kind of looked at him quizzically, and he put on a CD of his last session. It was "death metal". I don't know if you are familiar with the genre, but it involves a couple of guitars, bass, and drums, and there are some very specific things that have to be there, and they all were. Basically, the VU meters swung completely to the right, the needles right against the pins, and didn't move. A wave of dense sound hit us, with kind of a "SHUGGAH-SHUGGAH-SHUGGAH-SHUGGAH" beat barely distinguishable, but very distorted and with no discernable key or pitch at all, and a Satan-like voice, also very distorted, began declaiming something unintelligible. Our eyes popped open, and the engineer smiled at our reaction. "Wait until we get about two-thirds of the way through." he said. Sure enough, at the two-thirds mark the VU meters needles swung completely to the left as the music abruptly stopped, almost making our ears pop with the sudden drop in pressure. In the silence, the drummer hit a tiny splash cymbal and choked it, and then the Armageddon started up again to finish off the remaining third of the song.
That experience went a long way to convincing me that "noise" is surely in the ears of the listener!
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