Lucky Cloud, Your Sky

I am going to start posting some things from my thesis as I attempt to work them out. Sometimes these ideas will be more complete than others. This one, for instance, is the beginning of an idea but could possibly be interesting to others. I have the aim of taking this further and using consonance and dissonance as organizing principles for other sorts of realms: linguistic, political, social, etc. etc. I’m just trying to bang out some relations here, as it stands.

[[[Consonan(ts/ce)]]]

While a vowel sound is formed in the larynx, and only receives its special quality by the conformation of the oral cavity through which it is sounded, a consonant sound is wholly or mainly produced in the mouth, or the mouth and nose. Vowels thus consist of pure voice or musical sound; consonants are either simple noises or noises combined in various degrees with voice. But a noise may itself be of a continuous and rhythmical character, as a friction, trill, hiss, or buzz, and those consonants in which this is markedly the case approach closely to vowels, and may perform the function of a vowel in a syllable. Hence ‘the boundary between vowel and consonant, like that between the different kingdoms of nature, cannot be drawn with absolute definiteness, and there are sounds which may belong to either’ (SWEET Handbk. Phonetics §164)

In the Western tonal musical form, the tension of dissonance is always relieved by a consonant homecoming; this is implied even in the facetious mischief of the avant-garde. (Robin Mackay, “Wildstyle in Full Effect”)

The constellation of consonance and consonants presents an interesting phonetical/musical dilemma: the consonant is that which is seen to be separated from the “musical sound” of the vowel (noise, attack, buzz, trill, hiss), but etymologically,

c.1308, from L. consonantem (nom. consonans), prp. of consonare “to sound together,” from com- “with” + sonare, from sonus “sound” (see sound (n.1)). Consonants thought of as sounds that are only produced together with vowels.

this sounding together takes on a differ color and shape–they are sounds that “sound good together.” To be consonant is to be attack, to delineate the space of a pure tone, but also to suggest the ideal combination of tones.

However, as Mackay also notes, once harmony (or consonance) becomes monometric, it slides into rhythm, which, strictly speaking, eschews any measure of consonance or dissonance to become a sort of consonant: a form rather than a substance, a stutter-stop-and-go, never produced in itself, but instead as functional structure, that which can only be produced as a quality consonant with “musical tone” or “vowels.” The picking of a guitar string is a consonant, the sounding of a CMaj chord is consonant, but becomes a rhythm once you repeat it, a consonant. This is like the consonant, the “attack” of language, where vowels are the “tones.” However, the rhythm of language and music is as much in “attack” as in the timing of deployment, in the drawing out of vowels as much as the attack of speech or instrumentation.

To further complicate their relationship vis-a-vis rhythm, consonance can be examined as the pleasurable combination or even nesting of waveforms, themselves essentially possessing a rhythm of consonants–waves with peaks and troughs. Or, in this case, the relative minimizing of dissonance.

Consonance and dissonance are real and mutually determining categories. Furthermore, remembering that Stravinsky nearly had the crap beaten out of him at the first performance of “Rites of Spring,” and was carried out on people’s shoulders in the second shows that they are not only mutually determined, but also culturally and neurologically determined: what is seen as dissonant often fades into the soft embrace of consonance (which, itself, is only a relative measure of dissonance) once the brain and the cultural tide catch up to it. Consonance is dissonance we are used to.