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In music, consonance and dissonance are categorizations of simultaneous or successive sounds.Within the Western tradition, some listeners associate consonance with sweetness, pleasantness, and acceptability, and dissonance with harshness, unpleasantness, or unacceptability, although there is broad acknowledgement that this depends also on familiarity and musical expertise. [1]
Dissonant counterpoint was originally theorized by Charles Seeger as "at first purely a school-room discipline," consisting of species counterpoint but with all the traditional rules reversed. First species counterpoint must be all dissonances, establishing "dissonance, rather than consonance, as the rule," and consonances are "resolved ...
Resolution in Western tonal music theory is the move of a note or chord from dissonance (an unstable sound) to a consonance (a more final or stable sounding one). Dissonance, resolution, and suspense can be used to create musical interest.
The song was a hit on US college radio but achieved only moderate commercial success. Lamenting this, musician and critic Scott Miller wrote: "From the jazzy, almost dissonant opening riff to the absolutely unforgettable chorus, this is one of music's most glaring should-be-classics."
Such tones are most obvious in homophonic music but occur at least as frequently in contrapuntal music. According to Music in Theory and Practice, "Most nonharmonic tones are dissonant and create intervals of a second, fourth or seventh", [4] which are required to resolve to a chord tone in conventional ways.
Ganga is a dissonant form of singing, using two clashing notes to project sound over long distances. For example, if one person is singing a C note, a second person sings either a half-step above or below (B or C ♯). Ganga is traditionally sung by sheepherders across stretches of valleys, for long-distance communication with each other.
Rudhyar gave the subtitle "A New Principle of Musical and Social Organization" to his book Dissonant Harmony, writing, "Dissonant music is thus the music of true and spiritual Democracy; the music of universal brotherhoods; music of Free Souls, not of personalities. It abolishes tonalities, exactly as the real Buddhistic Reformation abolished ...
Music theorist Robert Morgan has argued that a central tenet of Schenkerian thought—that only consonant triads are capable of prolongation—needlessly excludes a class of dissonant sonorities, such as diminished sevenths or a more arbitrarily defined set of pitches; Morgan claims that, starting in the 19th century, composers such as Liszt ...