2026-10-19 15:05 UTC
@ossobuffo@triangletoot.party
I took a late-19th-century symphonies course in grad school with Robert Bailey, an expert in that era, who had a lot of interesting ideas. One that stuck with me is that the cliche of the “expansion of dissonance” through the late 19th century into the 20th has it all backwards. Consonance is what got expanded.
Replies (2)
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@mcmullin@musicians.today 2026-10-19 15:09
@ossobuffo@triangletoot.party The dissonances in Bach are as fierce as any you find in Mahler. That’s not what changed. What changed is that harmonies (like 6th chords, sometimes 9ths) that could only have functioned as dissonances before, requiring specific resolution, started to be acceptable as consonant resolutions themselves.
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@culturednyc@mastodon.social 2026-10-19 15:15
@mcmullin@musicians.today @ossobuffo@triangletoot.party Exactly right. A dissonance is just something that stylistically requires contrapuntal or harmonic resolution, while consonances may follow each other freely. Personally, when I was in my late teens, I listened to Schoenberg's op. 11 over and over again, and then I had an epiphany and it no longer sounded strange to me.