Towards a New Consonance

It seems that Contemporary Serious Music has been steadily moving back to consonance. It has also moved away from a certain kind of seriousness, and let out a sort of new humor to permit itself to go different directions at the will of the spirit and the wandering composer's mind.

We have stared at the abyss that Shoemberg left us and beyond. The complete tools and development of the tonal system have been undeniably broken, or revealed in its complex simplicity, all the DNA exposed to the California Sun.

I heard a story in an interview with Shoemberg's son: a Hollywood composer came by to ask for lessons to learn some tricks of the trade. And the master pointed Beethoven's complete works and said that he knew all of it, that's the trick.

In 1991 I met Msier Pierre Shaffeur, one of the creators of the Musique Concréte, maybe the first man to make a loop out of magnetic tape; for sure one of the first to create full musical compositions out of this basic idea. He was an old man already when we met, and we watched a film documenting his work early in the XX Century, all in black and white, I believe it was still on a 16mm projector. The he gave a class and then we went out and talked till late. At the end he said that he was back at the notes that he loves Bach. We all love Bach.

At some point we got the message and that abyss of post war trauma coincided with a moment of a change in awareness about our role in the planet and our responsibility with each other. But I diverge, we know history.

Movement towards atonal, complex, non repetitive, post-tonal, percussive, serial, super-organized, aleatoric, timbristic, microtonal, pythagorean, electronic. All different direction that share in common a certain revolt against the consonant triad in cadential progression that constitute the ground upon which the tonal system had been built.

Of course the law of unpredictability dictates that the unpredictable becomes predictable after a while, even if not memorable. Even if so complex as to defy the limits of perception and assimilation, the musical fabric became a texture that weaves and dances in a freak show of hysteric spasm and in inconceivable peace of immaculate single pitches in perfect democratic equalitarian balance, ideally unstable in front of us, hypnotically aiming at some point in the future, with disdain to the past.

And then back to the silence where Cage and Hiroshima left us.

And then back to one single note. The unison.

Unison. All together now, the wealth of the experience of the one pitch. Let's share in common union, the unison, and the brilliance of the harmonic series. The harmonic series is a fact of nature, we hear it, we enjoy it, it may be quantifiable, but the ratios do not translate the experience.

We went back to modes and the origins of the system as we know it, trying to retrace our steps and follow distant threads that might have led to different places. Exploring the unusual modes and superimposing them, or using the very familiar chords and repeating them in meditation, an attitude that removes the sense of tonal direction.

We need a new consonance - someone must have thought. A nostalgic return to the resolution of the dominant chord, or modal paths that aim not at predictable ends - our ears have changed. There are new realms that we want to tread upon.