Yesterday I spoke about how Schoenberg’s pieces and philosophical writings have started us on a journey to have our ears judge works by their thematic content rather than whether all the dissonances are handled like Bach would have wanted them too. Today, I wanted to post some music (better than JT) where the heavy use of what would be considered dissonance in functionally tonal works is used casually. The point of this is to demonstrate that our ears consider these effects to be fairly stable.
Listen to Brad Mehldau’s Martha My Dear (an awesome cover of The Beatles song). At about 20 seconds in, he starts using intervals that would, in functional tonality, need to collapse, but he instead jumps the interval around maintaining the right hand’s job as the melody. He is essentially using “dissonant” intervals as a doubling of the melodic voice. In the baroque, all the way through the late romantic, any doubling was usually done at the octave, thirds or sixth. In Meldhau’s improvisation, at that point, the doubling is at the 7th. Our ears do not think twice about this.
Skip in this Radiohead video to 1:30. The very beginning has a series of attacks by the Guitarist which stack and stack, eventually creating a cluster. This cluster is used as a sonic padding through the entire song. Until the piano finally comes in about 45 seconds later any sense of tonality is indiscernible. Even though the guitar’s use in this piece is different than the Mehldau (as a harmonic function rather than melodic) it still doesn’t cause our ears to vomit at the ugliness of clashing pitches. In both cases their use is actually aesthetically pleasing. In the Mehldau work it ads a new interesting flavor to the vanilla melody that The Beatles wrote and in Radiohead’s case, the effect is quite beautiful.
Culturally, we have come an incredibly long way from the squelching pressure of music’s performance permission based on whether the work is functionally tonal or not. There are many remnants of of this pressure, largely due to expectations by some audiences on what classical music should sound like. But the ubiquity of dissonant intervals and gestures being used as consonant objects in all forms of music will further erode these expectations.
One of Schoenberg’s goals in emancipating dissonance was to free us from the expectation that music should be functionally tonal. Though he was unable to do this himself (as we are still on this path he started us on), what he did end up doing was move our cultural ears forward so that certain clusters and intervals that were traditionally thought of as needing to resolve in a certain manner could now be used in a consonant fashion. So, thank you Mr. Schoenberg for providing the cultural basis for acceptance of my compositions and their repeating minor or major seconds. Thank you for forcing society’s ears on a path where Jazz musicians can use 7ths, 11ths and any number of crazy extensions as if they were the normal pitches in a major chord. I may not enjoy some of you music, but God Bless You Mr. Schoenberg.