Dissonance

Over the last 2000 years or so Western culture has been the incubator for the development of a system of tonal harmonic organization.  Unlike many of the other great musical cultures in the world, Western European musicians and thinkers have spent a lot of time figuring out how to put together stacks of simultaneously sounding musical tones.  That means that we have neglected a lot of other things of course, but that is the subject of another post.   Tonal harmony is based on the organization of consonant and dissonant collections of pitches.  Very simply put, consonant collections of pitches are ones that we feel are stable and dissonant ones need resolution to make them consonant.

The feeling of harmonic tension is established in two principle ways.  First, it predominates in most of the music we hear in Western culture.  Most of us hear harmony even while in the womb.  Second, there are actual physical processes involved in the perception of intervals and chords.  In his book, "On the Sensations of Tone", Helmholtz described how consonant intervals like a fifth or fourth create simple vibrational modes int he eardrum.  He said that we perceive these vibrational modes as having a smooth texture whereas dissonant intervals produce a feeling of roughness due to their more complicated vibrational patterns.  These sensations of smoothness or roughness would therefore be independent of culture.  If this interests you, read Helmholz.

Just as some people will learn to experience pleasure from bitter or sour flavours, human beings can learn to appreciate the complex sensations of dissonant intervals.  In fact, without dissonance, tonal music would be very boring indeed.  We use musical dissonance or harmonic tension to provide a sense of motion and progression.  Tension helps us to go to interesting places and also to feel a need to return to a state of stability or consonance.  In the past 150 years or so, musicians have increased their ability to deal with and accommodate dissonance in tonal music to the point where some people (probably a very small number in truth) will tell you that the ideas of dissonance and consonance don't mean anything anymore. 

I could go on and on about this but really all of this talk has meant to prepare you, dear reader, to think about harmonic dissonance as an analogy.  I have been thinking a lot about the idea of cognitive dissonance between ideas.  I am fascinated by the fact that people can entertain simultaneous thoughts or concepts which somehow contradict each other or which are in some degree in conflict.  In other words, I think we are, almost by nature, a species of hypocrites.  We espouse moral ideas which we do not live, we legislate laws which no one can obey, we harbour values and concepts which contradict each other.  Philosophers often concern themselves with clarifying such tensions and popular culture abounds with advertisements for various schemes to find inner peace.

In my own life I experience various levels of ongoing cognitive dissonance.  As a person who professes to be a Christian, I am keenly aware of the fact that my actions frequently betray my best intentions and fall short of my ideals for behaviour.  I claim to value kindness, yet I have a deeply sarcastic streak.  I claim to value mercy, yet I can be judgmental with my fellows.  These are clear dissonances between moral ideals and daily action.  These are dissonances that I seek to resolve through efforts to improve each day.  These dissonances are a spur to change and which seem to be of a certain class; they make me uncomfortable and unhappy.  To the degree which I can resolve them I seem to find more happiness. 

There is another class of cognitive dissonances with which I am infinitely more comfortable and these are perhaps of a more rarefied type.  For instance, though I have a great faith and appreciation for science and the power of the human intellect to apprehend its own experiences in the world, I seem to have a lot of experiences in my life which are not easily explained by intellect or observation. I am keenly aware of experiences which seem to transcend the objective.  Abraham Heschel describes such experiences as encounters with the ineffable.  For folk of religious faith, this is not so unusual.  There are of course many who do not believe that such experiences are anything more than fabrications and imaginings of the subconscious mind.  On extreme ends of the spectrum there are religious folk who discount science as a poor substitute for faith and at the other end there are those who deny the possibility of anything beyond the objective.  For people at these extremes, it seems to me that dissonance is unacceptable.  It must be resolved and put to rest permanently.

Most people I know come down somewhere in the middle.  For me, the dynamic interaction between faith and doubt, between the reliable methods of science and Heschel's experience of the ineffable is of great value.  The dissonance in these ideas provides fuel for inquiry of various kinds.  In "Israel and the World: Essays in a Time of Crisis", the Jewish philosopher (and Heschel's teacher), Martin Buber, suggests a view of religious faith (and doubt) which has a deep resonance for me as a way of relating to the cognitive dissonances I experience.  He helps to reinforce the idea that dissonance need not always be resolved, or at least that it need not be resolved permanently.
 
"Real faith does not mean professing what we hold to be true in a ready-made formula. On the contrary: it means holding ourselves open to the unconditional mystery which we encounter in every sphere of our life and which cannot be comprised in any formula. It means that, from the very roots of our being we should always be prepared to live with this mystery as one being lives with another.  Real faith means the ability to endure life in the face of this mystery."

Music for me is an inquiry into mystery but not an inquiry which I hope ends in a comfortable and complacent truth.  It provides a very rich and complicated system of actions and interactions where we can explore seeming conflicts between dissonance and consonance.  In my best musical experiences, the physical reality of sound and the tactile, tangible control of instruments and bodies interacts seamlessly with complex interpersonal   issues, the depths of human intellect and creativity and, in special moments, a brush with the ineffable.  Dissonance keeps us searching, keeps us moving somewhere. We can learn to savour it and value it.  The resolution of dissonance is not the end, but only a moment of calm and stability before motion begins again.  Without dissonance and tension we have only stasis.  An unending drone of boredom.