Wasn’t dissonance emancipated ?
Emancipation should mean freedom from boundaries, no hierarchy : simply equality. Instead it too easily comes to mean something quite unlike that : an enforced equality. At the onset of the 20th centurt Arnold Schoenberg fought that fight but it’s not settled yet. I doubt if I can settle it either, but I want to make some suggestions.
Schoenberg did not begin his revolutionary work with serial ordering but with a kind of complexity of pitch relations often called atonality—a form of dissonance seeking a complexity different from that of late romantic music. The kind of order implied by it depends upon approaching near to chaos. That this coincided with the near collapse of European civilization shows how very upsetting living in that time and place was. But imposed order does not bring new kinds of harmony. It challenges, bringing questions, not answers.
Recent events are showing us that, like it or not, in certain inescapable ways we already live in one interdependent world. Many attempts to achieve one unified world began as revolutions the chaos of which afforded opportunities for leaders with overweening ambition backed by radical world-views who sought to impose some innovative way of livIng on as large groups of people as possible. What is missing in such dissonant times is an equal importance for consonance: for clarity, for harmonious order. Music is not an answer but it can powerfully symbolize one.
More to come.