Consonance and Dissonance in Balance
Post-nineteenth century music has evolved in the way that tension may be less often prepared and less formally structured than in Baroque or Classical periods, thus producing new styles such as post-romantic harmony, impressionism, pantonality, Jazz and Blues, where dissonance may not be prepared in the way seen in 'common practice' harmony. In a jazz or blues song, the tonic chord may be a dominant seventh chord.
The creation and destruction of harmonic and 'statistical' tensions is essential to the maintenance of compositional drama. Any composition (or improvisation) which remains consistent and 'regular' throughout is, for me, equivalent to watching a movie with only 'good guys' in it, or eating cottage cheese. —Frank Zappa, "The Real Frank Zappa Book" page 181, Frank Zappa and Peter Occhiogrosso, 1990Read more about this topic: Harmony
Famous quotes containing the words dissonance and/or balance:
“That, of course, was the thing about the fifties with all their patina of familial bliss: A lot of the memories were not happy, not mine, not my friends’. That’s probably why the myth so endures, because of the dissonance in our lives between what actually went on at home and what went on up there on those TV screens where we were allegedly seeing ourselves reflected back.”
—Anne Taylor Fleming (20th century)
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