When Quality Reaches Its Limit: A New Interpretative Approach to Understand Post-tonal Harmony

Abstract

To make post-tonal harmony more accessible, many music scholars derive various theories, which rely on the traditional notions of consonance and dissonance, to describe the quality of a chord. Most of these theories use the quality of an interval as the criterion to measure the proportion between the consonances and dissonances within a chord. All intervals can be categorized as either consonances or dissonances except for one—the tritone. Although traditionally in tonal music, the tritone was perceived as a dissonance; its quality in twentieth-century music, however, has been challenged by many scholars. It may sound like a dissonant (Paul Hindemith), a consonant (Joseph Straus), or a neutral interval (Charles Seeger). If different viewpoints abound in the tritone’s quality, do we hear it as adding the consonant or dissonant sound to a chord? Confronted with this issue, this article suggests an alternative way of perceiving all intervals—their space—and further proposes a method that assists us in hearing a chord in terms of its degree of compactness. Based on this method, we can experience the dynamics created by the confrontation between spatial and compact chords, and find post-tonal harmony more accessible.