The rub between consonance and dissonance

In a troubled world

There’s an urge to consonance. To put things in tune. This suggests that we require consonance, but that its opposite, dissonance, is the more natural state of nature, and nature requires human intervention to set it straight. That human imperative can be seen early when a child takes a pile of Lego bricks and starts assembling the individual pieces and giving them form, or when a blues guitarist takes a minor third and bends the string until the pitch has been raised by one note, bringing it into line with the other notes of a major chord.

But, for me at least, it’s in the cracks, the infinite increments of distance between the two, that interest lies. I don’t feel at ease in a perfectly clean room, at least not until I’ve sat on the couch and put some dents in the cushions. If someone has meticulously arranged the magazines on the coffee table to be at uniformly perfect right angles, I can’t resist the temptation to reach over and mess them up. Of course, it might just be that I have a contrarian nature, and I wouldn’t argue with that - except, I probably would because that would be more, well, you get the point.

So what does it matter? And if being ‘in tune’ or ‘out of tune’ concerns people who do music, what’s it got to do with the rest of us? I don’t know what the answer is, I’m not sure I even know what the question is. But to the degree that music, for someone like me who plays musical instruments every day to put some food over my head and a roof on the table, messing things up and getting them the wrong way round, looking at them from a weird perspective and then trying to do the reverse is not just a mental exercise, it’s really the way I stumble through life - getting ever more confused. Older and none the wiser.

Music is only alive when it’s infused with life by the person who’s making columns of air move. That process of music being realised, made real, starts deep inside someone’s brain when chemical and electrical signals that we don’t fully understand compel muscle movement that in turn agitates a reed or a string or a skin whose natural state is inert. The agitation itself is finite: friction and the laws of inertia sooner or later require further action for a string to continue to vibrate, and for as long as an imperative keeps on repeating the process, sound is created and columns of air vibrate that register in the auditory equipment of people in sufficiently close proximity - and, if it feels good, they respond to it and if it feels bad they respond to it too (Pet Shop Boys records notwithstanding).

The nature of the vibrations and the nature of the response are what concern me. And concern is quite a good word here because I think I belong to that small segment of the population that is troubled by music.

Being troubled by musical sound, being concerned with it, is a state which probably is the result of genetic accidents, perhaps a genetic predisposition that is either fed and nourished early or not, as the case may be. I don’t know, the nature or nurture question is interesting to me. But that word ‘troubled’ comes close to describing the compulsion to generate musical sounds. I don’t do it because it gives me pleasure. Playing music is not ‘fun’. It might be truer to say that the act of playing music is perhaps one way that it’s possible to impose order, temporarily, at least on the chaos in the room or even the chaos in the world. But it’s a perpetual fight because walls tumble down, the mowed lawn becomes overgrown, a butterfly flaps its wings, and on the other side of an ocean, an avalanche roars down a mountain, etc, etc... And then there’s people…

People are constantly doing all sorts of crazy shit and most of the human energy granted to us in our short life on the planet is taken up mopping up the world’s spilt milk. I’m powerless and enfeebled watching the consequences of one man’s actions, the stroke of a pen, that compel an army of soldiers to march over somebody’s border and set the sparks that result in so much human misery, I’m helpless when I read that someone struck a match and that consequently a beautiful old building that’s sat for over a hundred years far away in Haiti is reduced to ashes in minutes.

One thing I can do is convert an Eb into an E natural on an instrument or in my imagination. And, when I do, things - for a second at least - feel better. But it’s the process of doing it. The ‘thing in itself’. To put something in order, it has to be out of order to start with. And if everything in the world were perpetually and completely in order, I don’t think I could live in it. That’s the oxygen of someone who is troubled by music, or troubled by words or colours too, perhaps. I don’t pretend to any expertise in any of those fields; anyone who does is a charlatan - but it does lead one to ask questions about what it means to be human; the idea that we have emerged from trouble and that trouble is what agitates us to make life’s strings vibrate. In the words of the great Bobby Womack: “Things have to get just a little bit salty, to let you know that you’re still around”.

There is no consonance without dissonance. Something has to be wrong if we ever have a hope of it one day being right - I suppose. And as if to prove the point, she who must be obeyed at all times has just corrected the problem of my empty tea cup by, bless her, bringing me a fresh, hot, steamy one. Perhaps I should immediately go and sit down at the piano.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this, much as in the same way that I’m never sure what’s going to follow when I choose to apply gentle pressure with a fingertip to any one of the 88 keys available to me on the old Spinet piano in the red room.

I wonder if I shouldn’t perhaps record some audio for a future Substack to attempt to demonstrate this enigma of the desirability of dissonance and the incongruity of consonance by playing some examples on a few of the musical instruments I have to hand.

These words were written a couple of days ago, and I’d forgotten about them. Having just stumbled across this in the ‘draft’ folder, it occurs to me that, if anyone’s actually reading this stuff, they’re probably thinking, ‘what on earth is he waffling on about?’ So, if there’s a semblance of sense in any of it, I should probably illustrate the point with some actual noise. I have decided to step over to the piano, here in the red room, and generate some musical vibrations. To put my music where my mouth is, so that you, dear reader, can become a dear listener and hear some examples.

Here are a quick two minutes of spontaneous, improvised music designed to provide examples of repeated dissonance giving way to consonance and ending on an Eb major seventh (which, it occurred to me, was a good place to stop because the chord in this context is both things: consonant and dissonant - to my ears at least). I made it up as I went along. It’s the only time this particular combination of notes has been played in this particular sequence; it’s a one-off. It will never be played again. Such is the nature of improvisation. I wouldn’t call it ‘Jazz’ because that word doesn’t mean anything. It’s just me moving columns of air, in a troubling way, that is the sound, to me, of my mind…in the world…at the moment.

Please don’t hesitate to leave a note below if you have any thoughts. I nearly always enjoy reading them and find them interesting….