Is there a known point in history where dissonance became acceptable?

Question

So, I'm not a scholar of music history, but I have a basic timeline. The evolution of Western music theory had several times in which certain chords and intervals were considered too "jarring" or "dissonant", but eventually became acceptable as composers found ways to make it work. Obviously, music evolves.

My question is, was there a specific impetus that pushed the role of dissonance out of the jarring mechanism it's normally used as, to simply adding complexity and an "unfinished" quality to chords and phrases? In short, what propelled music from this:

Sergey Rachmaninoff - Bogoroditse Djevo (1915)

... where the chord structure, though complex, stays pretty consonant, to this...

Samuel Barber - Agnus Dei (Adagio for Strings) (1938)

... where the chord progressions introduce and then resolve quite a bit of dissonance through the phrases, to this:

John Tavener - The Lamb (1982)

... where the majority of the piece is atonal, and intervals we don't normally hear figure prominently, to this...

Eric Whitacre - Water Night (1994)

... where at one point the choir builds to a 19-note "cluster chord", containing every pitch in the key through two and a half octaves (and that's not the most "dissonant" part of the piece by far).

There seems to have been a BIG change in the way we think about dissonance between WWII and the roughly present-day. Even in mosuc with an established key and using pretty standard progressions, the movement of voices to create major and minor second dissonances is now often relished instead of glossed over. Example: "Lully, Lulla, Lullay"; It's very tonally-centered, firmly in the minor key, but has dissonant movement all through it. It would be stereotypical to say that the impetus was the change in all kinds of thinking during the 60's, but that may well be the case; the influence of other genres and of environmentalist thought were certainly present in classical music during that time, as evidenced by the mere existence of a classical piece titled "The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer". I don't have too many notable examples of classical music from that era, certainly not a capella choral to fit the rest of the selections. Does anyone have more information than I to back up this hypothesis?

Answer 1

I'm also not a scholar on music history, but I think dissonance started to be taken into account with the continuous modulation Wagner used in his compositions. He is often seen as the father of chromaticism.

After Wagner, we have Debussy. He created a brand new scale, the hexatonic scale (C D E F# G# A#) where the fundamental C chord (C E G) became a "strange" C chord, C E G#. Thus, continuing the destruction of the tonal system, started by Wagner.

We can go on and on, one of my favourites is Béla Bartók, his works are completely out of the tonal system. He studied ancient folk songs, which were composed with no knowledge on music theory and where dissonance was peacefully present.

In "Water Night", from Whitacre, there is no key, thus making it perfectly understandable he keeps building from the fifth chord, goes to a seventh, a ninth, and so on.

Long story short: Wagner started to make dissonance acceptable.

EDIT: When I say "dissonance started to be taken into account" I mean when dissonance started to be studied, not only used to create simple tensions and simple modulations. A whole new music school derived from that study.

Answer 2

Beethoven, throughout his lifetime, created music that pushed the limits of tonality. In the classical period there were "rules" for how far you could push these limits, governed by contrapuntal techniques that evolved from the 16th century.

In Beethoven's later works you begin to hear more and more dissonance. Musically speaking, it is agreed by most music history scholars that Beethoven ushered in the Romantic period. As music progressed, different composers pushed the bounds of consonance vs dissonance with modulations, alternative scales, and even atonality; as well as questioning and expanding everything about music (instrumentation, rhythmic complexity, notation, etc.)

As Beethoven paved the way for Romantic period composers to become more independent of the "rules" of the past, so Wagner did for 20th century composers. This is not to say that Wagner is the only composer that affected the change, but he had one of the most far reaching impacts on future composers.

The concept of sustained dissonance was brought to its peak by Arnold Schoenberg and his concept of atonal, or pantonal, composition. However, all musical evolution is just that: evolution. The process of musical change is not usually sudden.

Is there a point in history where dissonance became acceptable? There is not really a specific date. Schoenberg didn't even start out writing atonal music; his early style is very romantic sounding. He was a revolutionary and he did greatly affect the musical culture around him in the early 1900's. It took people time, however, to accept his theories. This could explain why you hear a change in the mid-1900's.

I hope all this info helps.

Edit: As far as the specific pieces you pointed out, here are some comments about the progression of the musical styles they represent:

• Rachmaninoff represents a lush romantic sound
• Samuel Barber moves further into a 20th century style, with a great deal of sustained, but at some point resolved, dissonances
• The Lamb is not atonal, but does sound tonally ambiguous because of its use of accidentals;
• Then to Water Night, where Whitacre uses a technique call pandiatonicism (using all of the notes in the scale in clusters) but staying in the key or in related keys. His concept of sustained dissonance without resolution gives a very powerful innovative sound.

Answer 3

I find the Tavener and Whitacre to be very consonant-sounding and beautiful. On the other hand, the parallel fifths and fourths of Medieval organum sound unpleasant and jarring to me, although they probably sounded melodious and sweet to the original performers.

I see two ways of interpreting your question.

1. When did the use of dissonance change from shocking and jarring to peaceful and resolved?

This has never happened, in that whatever is shocking and jarring to a particular person's ears is "dissonant", and whatever is peaceful and resolved is "consonant".

1. When did such-and-such a dissonance become a consonance?

It happens all the time. Between the Medieval and Baroque eras, parallel fifths changed from consonance to dissonance -- a single open fifth is not dissonant, but a series of them sounds weird and wrong. At the same time, the major third became a consonance.

I think maybe the specific answer to your question "when did early 20th-century dissonances become consonances" is "when whichever piece of classical music first used an added-sixth chord as an ending." For instance, C-E-G-A-C in C major. This turned up in jazz and classical music, in Ravel and Bix Beiderbecke for instance. I don't know which of the two was first; Ravel was a jazz fan and Bix was a Ravel fan. It appears in Debussy's "Gollywog's Cakewalk" although not in the real cakewalks that influenced Debussy. Maybe it appears in Faure or Wagner; I don't know, I'll have to listen carefully for it. You certainly hear it all the time in jazz from the 1920's on. (We don't know much about the chords used in jazz in its first two decades, from the 1890's until it was first recorded around 1917.) Messiaen makes very frequent use of this chord. Maybe that's what made Pierre Boulez think Messiaen's music is "brothel music".

Milhaud's "Creation du Monde" was influenced by jazz, and the very last chord adds the leading tone (i.e. B in a C major chord). It's just amazingly beautiful, and if the melody line went G-A-B-C instead of G-A-Bflat-B it would be pleasant but uninteresting.

(Edit: I suddenly realized that the ending of "Creation du Monde" comes almost directly from the cliched barber-shop "Good Evening Friends" ending! (Added-6th: C-E-G-A. Good Evening Friends: C-E-G-Bflat. Milhaud: C-E-G-B.) So if you can find the first use of "Good Evening Friends", you've got an answer.)

Answer 4

There are degrees of dissonance, and over the course of music history, musical compositions became more tolerant of increasing degrees of dissonance and using more acute dissonance more often. It is a continuum. There was not an identifiable point at which any of this changed.