Avant-garde conceptions of harmony

The course of harmony after Wagner followed three distinct paths. (1) Within the broad outlines of tonality, composers explored the potential of chords of far greater complexity than the traditional triad. In doing so they often allowed unstable chords such as dominant sevenths to stand as self-sufficient entities, and they greatly increased the use of ambiguous chords such as augmented sixths and diminished sevenths to thicken or occasionally to blur the sense of a stable tonality. (2) Composers broke away from the classical system of tonality by using chords that, although clearly recognizable as derived from earlier harmonic practices, resolved in other than the expected direction. Some also went further afield by substituting for the major and minor scales unusual scales such as whole tone and Gypsy folk music scales, by using chords built out of fourths, and by utilizing polytonality. (3) Composers systematically abandoned tonality through Schoenberg’s technique of granting equal importance to all 12 chromatic tones, rather than allowing one tone to predominate as tonic. When this was done, the concept of a single, predominant key centre vanished entirely in favour of atonality. In such cases, the traditional duality of consonance and dissonance also disappeared.

Among most “progressive” composers of the 20th century, atonality has been extensively explored. By far the greatest concern among avant-garde composers has been to revive contrapuntal writing, or composition stressing the combination of independent melodic lines. This was partly a reaction against the lush harmonies and lyricism of the Romantic period. During the common practice period any counterpoint that occurred was subordinated to the principles of traditional harmony. The 20th-century obsession with counterpoint tended to sweep aside concern with harmonic relationships beyond the incidental fact that clusters of notes in counterpoint are indeed heard simultaneously. In the music of the American Charles Ives, for example, many skeins of fully developed atonal, contrapuntal writing pass by simultaneously, producing momentary sonorities. Such sonorities may occasionally, and quite accidentally, be identical with recognizable harmonies; but these accidental sonorities have little to do with traditional harmonic organization. Similarly, the “tone-cluster” writing of another American innovator, Henry Cowell, whereby a pianist’s forearm sounds every note it can depress at once, can hardly be analyzed as functional harmony in any sense.

Other developments, too, point to the dissolution of traditional attitudes toward harmony. The aleatory, or indeterminacy, experiments of John Cage, Earle Brown, and others assign part of the composer’s melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic events to a specific performer at a specific instance. In such music any discussion of harmonic direction is irrelevant. Most importantly, the rise of electronic music, which breaks away from any traditional scales such as might be produced on “normal” instruments, can only with the greatest stretch of the imagination lend itself to considerations of harmony.

Yet, there is a possible analogy with traditional harmony in electronic music as its musical styles and languages take shape. In the works of Karlheinz Stockhausen, one of the electronic pioneers and a composer of enormous influence among his younger colleagues, there are organizational systems that point to a clear control and regulation of musical elements. The strict control of musical factors such as densities of sonority, rates of rhythmic change and of change in phrase structure, rates of change in the spread of sound in an auditorium through the use of carefully positioned and modulated loudspeakers point toward a new musical system that may possibly be analyzed in terms of a new, fundamentally different harmony.

The dissolution of harmony in the “progressive” music of the 20th century was not a matter of anarchy replacing order. Actually, the common practice period is of relatively short duration against the entire history of harmony. Before Bach other rules existed. Such rules, in contrast to the later system of traditional harmony, depended not on the contrast of keys but on harmonic unity brought about by the use of a given mode. Since Debussy, similarly, harmonic styles have been dictated by new rules or by the desire of many composers to seek out new rules. And, as both the modal and the common practice systems of harmony evolved only after centuries, so is it also safe to predict that the seeming anarchy of much of 20th-century music represents a state of movement toward new harmonic precepts. The question at hand, moreover, is not one of the dissolution of harmony itself, for any notes sounded simultaneously produce a harmony—whether the notes be from traditional scales or from the infinity of musical pitches produceable through electronic means. The matter is, rather, the question of the uses to which these harmonies are put and the changing relations of harmony to musical structure.

An awareness of the value of harmony as pure, expressive sound persists among all composers of the present time. Some have pursued the atonal principles toward the point where harmonic sounds are totally dissonant (which is the same as saying that they are all consonant, because the contrast between consonance and dissonance disappears). Others have written works that consist of almost nothing but static, unadorned harmony—not necessarily harmoniousness. Such a work as Terry Riley’s In C, for example, consists basically of a sustained triad on C (lasting, at the performer’s option, anywhere from 30 minutes to several hours), over which fleeting dissonances are occasionally sounded, seldom more revolutionary than an F sharp or B flat. Here again, although one is more conscious of harmony in this work than of any other musical element, the harmony itself does not move or progress in the traditional sense; the sound exists, but not its function. Here one can discuss the work as pure consonance—which is the same, for lack of harmonic contrast, as pure dissonance.

Thus, in the 20th century the concepts basic to traditional harmony began to lose their importance. In counterpoint harmonies became the incidental result of the combination of melodic lines. New experiments with unusual harmonies (such as tone clusters, functionless in the traditional sense), the lessening of the tension between consonance and dissonance, and the creation of unprecedented harmonies by the use of computers have been the result of a search for new methods of musical organization. This in turn was the natural outgrowth of the blurring and final dissolution of the harmonic system that had prevailed for over two centuries in Western music.