Summary
James Tenney’s A History of ‘Consonance’ and ‘Dissonance’ (Excelsior Music Publishing Company, New York, ©1988, ISBN 0-935016-99-6) argues that no terms in music discourse are more burdened with semantic problems. Dictionaries, harmony textbooks, and musical-acoustics books show “considerable confusion and disagreement” about what “consonance” and “dissonance” mean. Tenney’s central claim is that the first problem is semantic: without a common understanding of what a theory of consonance and dissonance ought to explain, speculative theories are doomed from the start.
The book treats the “consonance/dissonance-concept” (CDC) historically, primarily through theoretical writings from the 3rd century B.C. through the 19th and early 20th centuries. It identifies at least five distinct historical uses of the terms—CDC-1 through CDC-5—and distinguishes conceptions of consonance and dissonance from explanatory theories, aesthetic attitudes, and practical uses, which followed relatively independent historical courses.
Key Points
- Representative dictionary and textbook definitions disagree about whether consonance means “pleasing,” “stable,” “restful,” or structurally included in a triad, and whether dissonance means “harsh,” “unstable,” “transitional,” or even more “beautiful” than consonance.
- Hindemith, Schoenberg, and Stravinsky all testify to the instability of the terms: Hindemith says the concepts “have never been completely explained”; Schoenberg makes perceptibility, not beauty, the criterion for accepting dissonances; Stravinsky notes the word dissonance has carried “a certain odor of sinfulness.”
- Tenney distinguishes five historical senses of the CDC: melodic relatedness before polyphony (CDC-1), sonorous quality of simultaneous dyads in early polyphony (CDC-2), 14th-century interval classification tied to counterpoint and perceptual clarity (CDC-3), early-18th-century application to individual chord tones (CDC-4), and mid-19th-century equation of dissonance with roughness (CDC-5).
- The words have both a “qualitive” sense (the property or quality) and an “entitive” sense (the sound or aggregate manifesting that quality), corresponding roughly to abstract versus concrete nouns.
- The book is not a history of dissonance “treatment” or of theories of consonance and dissonance as such, but a history of the underlying conceptions; other aspects are treated only as they clarify those conceptions in a given period.