Dissonance and Evil

EVERY one who cares for art, who likes to read discussions of art, must often have felt how fascinating, and yet how generally misleading, are the analogies which writers love to make between art and other human interests. Such analogies give us at first a delicious mental fillip, a sense of novel discovery and possession. We feel that we understand two things better by seeing wherein they are one. We thought we knew them before, but merely to contemplate them together gives to each a new color and charm. Unfortunately, however, further contemplation, as a rule, leads to doubt. The analogy limps, or halts altogether, and we are left with a sense of having been hoaxed. We find only superficial and entertaining the similarity we had fancied fundamental and enlightening; we are disappointed, or, worse still, in our enthusiasm we twist and misinterpret the facts, and are deceived.

Such analogies, as seductive as they are treacherous, have especially infested the literature of music. So different is music from anything else we deal with that critics have been sorely tempted, in treating it, to resort to mutilating simplifications, distorting comparisons, and explanations that do not explain. Sentimental essayists, whose vaporous effusions have delighted and betrayed thousands of readers, and metaphysical theorists, whose zeal for philosophy has been the measure of their violence to art, have devised the prettiest comparisons between music and something else, — one might almost say anything else, — the only drawback of which is that they are false. It is an awkward fact about music — awkward, that is, for the critics of it — that it is unique in human experience.

But to say that music is in the last analysis unlike anything else we know is not to say that our reactions upon it, which in their turn affect its own nature, are not in many respects like our reactions on our other experiences. Unique as the experience of music is in our world (for nowhere else do we encounter tones related to one another in time and pitch), yet the perception of this material, being a process of our minds, must share the nature of our other perceptions. As the human mind is everywhere one, all the matters it perceives have in common certain peculiarities produced by its mode of perceiving. Analogies, consequently, may be perfectly valid so long as they restrict themselves to these peculiarities; and by calling our attention to the subjective or self-supplied element in all our experience they may furthermore have for us a legitimate and deep interest. They can never take the place of observation, study, and experiment, but they can assuredly sharpen our wits and provoke our imaginations. Innutritious as mental foods, they may be valuable stimulants. Knowledge comes not only from the investigation of the unknown, but also from the analysis and ordering of the known; and to behold our minds performing one function in two different situations is to be both entertained and enlightened.

To trace the effect of the perceiving function of our minds in two such dissimilar realms as music and ethics, to see how our way of approaching them binds together even these, remote as they are, with fragile but tangible threads of analogy, will then, one may hope, be an interesting and not too dangerous task. Dangerous it certainly would be to hang too heavy a theory on threads so slender; but, after all, it is the threads and not the theory that now interest us. Our present purpose is merely to point out how, in music, dissonance, and in life, evil, alike depend in large part for their peculiar meaning and value on an identical element in our modes of viewing them, on an intrinsic and persistent peculiarity in our perceptive faculty.

It is not necessary to go very deeply into psychology, or to make any very technical definitions, in order to get before our minds, clearly enough for our present purpose, this peculiarity of perception. Perception, as we vaguely realize even without analysis, is a much more far-reaching and significant mental process than sensation. When we perceive we not only find certain impressions of the world coming to us from without, as is the case with sensation, but we also, by an inward and more or less self-determined activity, arrange these impressions in order, relate them intelligibly to one another, and thereby, as we say, possess them. Sensation, so to speak, happens to us; perception we win. Sensation is accidental, perception has purpose and value. It is a sort of intellectual reclaiming process by which we make the weeds of useless sense-impressions give place to crops of sustaining, vitalizing ideas. When, for example, hearing twelve strokes of a bell, we consider them not as isolated sounds but as the striking of a clock, we elevate a series of sensations into a perception. Or when, seeing an at first haphazard mass of dots on a sheet of paper, we suddenly discover that these dots make letters, and the letters a word, then we substitute a valuable and informing perception for our first chaotic bundle of sensations. Whenever, in short, we discern in a number of sensations any kind of relationship which unites them in a group, grafts upon them intelligible value, and domesticates them, so to say, in our service, we perceive. Perception is a process which by apprehending relations makes many things one, transforms chaos into order, and outlines on the shifting surface of chance a profile of meaning.

In no branch of human interest has the perceiving faculty achieved more remarkable results than in the art of music, where it has produced a continuous evolution of technique covering centuries of time, and constantly opening up the most unforeseeable and surprising vistas of new progress. In that art, moreover, none of its results are more interesting than one which is defined by implication in a distinction of terms which we may now profitably examine, — the distinction, namely, between the terms “dissonance” and “discord.” It is unfortunately a common error, especially with English musical writers, to use these terms as synonyms. To do so, however, is greatly to impoverish both language and thought; for there is between them one of those far-reaching distinctions of meaning of which a full analysis would constitute a philosophical theory. Stated as concisely as possible, the distinction is this: a discord is merely a harsh and disagreeable combination of sounds; a dissonance is a combination of sounds, which, though harsh in itself, is justified, and even necessitated, by certain musical laws. Any one can make a discord, by merely sitting on the piano keys; only a trained musician can write a dissonance. In brief, discord is accidental, fortuitous; it is that which happens to be unpleasant. Dissonance, on the other hand, is planned, intended; it is that which must be unpleasant. Furthermore, if we have borne in mind the nature of perception, we shall have no hesitation in adding that this accidental character of discord, and this purposeful character of dissonance, must ultimately depend on our being able to comprehend the latter, and not the former. Dissonance must be justified, if at all, by our perception in it of relations that we cannot perceive in discord. What, then, are these relations ?

Music, as every one knows, consists of several melodic parts, or “voices,” as they are called even when played by instruments instead of sung, going on at once and combining in a satisfactory mass of sound. These voices, each singing its own tune, are like so many strands in a basket, so many threads in a fabric, or so many members in a society. All must cooperate to produce one harmonious general result, yet each also has its measure of independence, goes its own way, and fulfills its own purpose. Like a human being, it is at once a citizen and an individual. Musicians, recognizing this twofold function of the parts, or voices, consider them from two points of view, and as subject to two realms of law. In the first place, they must, as a whole, make an agreeable combination of sound often enough to give us the feeling that they are working together, that they are not entirely unrelated and at cross purposes. The chords they form in the successive moments of their progress must be prevailingly “consonant;” that is, must be physically pleasant in the sense that they do not arouse in the ear distressing sensations that attend certain combinations of tones, and must be mentally grateful in the sense that they are easily recognized and perceived. On the other hand, when for a moment they make combinations which are painful to the ear or difficult to unravel, they must be so conducted as to make us feel their momentary harshness inevitable and right. Such laws, which concern the simultaneous combination of many voices in successive moments of time, are called harmonic laws. In the second place, each single voice is subject to certain other and equally important laws, which concern themselves not with its relation to the other voices, but with its individual coherence, significance, and interest. Of these, which may be called the melodic laws, the most important is that the single voice must make not a mere random series of tones, but an intelligible melody or tune. It must be built out of definite, recognizable figures or motifs, groups of tones having certain fixed relations in time and pitch; and these motifs must be so repeated and expanded and developed as to give it, as a whole, thematic meaning and point. Moreover, it must not stagnate in the moment, however interesting that may be, but must progress urgently toward a goal; it must give the sense of life and motion that is essential to any utterance, and particularly to musical utterance. This urgency of melody, this constant striving and pressing toward the goal, is perhaps the most characteristic feature of music.

It is on our clear perception of these harmonic and melodic relations of tones that our use of dissonance depends. Obviously enough, any given voice, at any given moment in the progress of a piece of music, may be obliged, in order to fill out a tonal figure or to carry out a melodic design, to take a tone that will not combine agreeably with those which the other voices, under similar obligations, must sound. For the moment, harmonic purity must be sacrificed to melodic interest. The result is a dissonance. It is now quite clear how such a dissonance differs from a discord. The discord is a mere accidental combination of disagreeable sounds; but the dissonance, embodying a momentary harshness as the unavoidable result of melodic tendencies being purposefully carried out, is in no sense accidental; its physical painfulness, even if extreme, is justified by a necessity perceived in it. We endure, we even welcome it, because we grasp its relations.

If dissonance is thus primarily a byproduct of melodic motion, however, it ends by being much more than that. Every musician will feel the erroneousness of defining dissonance as a mere result. The fact is that dissonance, reacting potently on the very melodic motion that produced it, becomes immediately one of the most vitalizing elements in musical effect. Even if we overlook, as we must do here, its merely sensuous value as an offset to the over-sweetness of too many consonant chords, we must be careful to estimate justly its service to melodic vitality. The unpleasantness of dissonance arouses in us a peculiar restlessness; it makes us impatient for the melodies to press on, to continue their motion until they reach a pleasanter place; and thus it deeply intensifies that sense of urgency, of progress, of motion, which is the life of melody. Like those rocks in a mountain brook which so pile up the water that, when they are once past, it hurls itself forward with new impetus, dissonances immensely reënforce the momentum of the melodies they momentarily encumber. They give the tension of palpitating life to an organism which without them would be flabby, stagnant, inert. In order to realize this, it is only necessary to play over, carefully noting the impulse given by the frequent dissonances to the melodic progress of the parts, a fugue of Bach, a sonata of Beethoven, or a novelette of Schumann.

This reënforcement of melodic vitality by dissonance, however, will occur only so long as we, the listeners, firmly grasp the melodic strands that lead us. They are the threads that penetrate the labyrinth ; so long as we hold them we shall advance with excitement and interest, but if we once lose them our interest will turn to confusion. Our perceptions, then, by which we seize the relations of the tones in the melodies and of the chords in the harmonic sequence, must be keen and well trained. We must be aware, at the moment of the dissonance, that all those jarring tones are part of a scheme that is being purposefully and intelligently carried out by the composer. If we fail even for an instant to hear each tone, we cannot be sensible of the added momentum it gets from the dissonance, or expectant of the tone it is progressing to, which will resolve the chaos into order. The melodies will lose for us their unity, and become meaningless fragments; the dissonance will degenerate into a discord. The effect of dissonance accordingly depends on the intelligence of the hearer, on his having trained perceptions. If these be lacking, one of the most potent formative agents of musical effect will mean to him mere ugliness and fatigue.

So much, then, for a brief sketch of one aspect of the psychology of dissonance. It has shown us, in the first place, how dissonant effects are reclaimed from the realm of mere meaningless discord by our faculty of perception; how, in the second place, they originate as by-products in the process of carrying out certain melodic tendencies; and how, finally, they end by giving an immense stimulus to these very melodic tendencies, the urgency of which is the fundamental vitalizing principle in music.

It requires, fortunately, no great learning or penetration, but only a natural interest in human life, and a habit of observing it, to discern in our attitude toward evil a striking analogy with our attitude toward dissonance. To discern this analogy is merely to point out how, in the two realms, widely sundered as they are, of music and of ethical life, our perceptive faculty is alike active, and leads to similar results. As a matter of fact, the phenomena of evil are determined by our ethical perceptions much as the phenomena of discord and dissonance are determined by our musical perceptions. And what is more, the average man is inclined to be as naive in his ethical as in his musical attitude.

Most people, it is curious to note, lump together as “evil” everything that is disagreeable. Evil is whatever hurts them, interferes with their comfort, upsets their plans. In this sense, death, poverty, disappointment in love, toothache, accidents, taxes, are examples of evil things. This view, crude and superficial as it is, is very widely held. It is the spontaneous view of the natural man. Its most striking peculiarity is that it takes no account of human reactions upon events, but accepts the events themselves as the ultimate and essential facts. The immediately pleasant it labels “good,” the immediately unpleasant “bad,” with charming naïveté. It even employs the terms of philosophy, such as “optimism” and “pessimism,” which properly define only general mental attitudes, to describe the facts of mere experience: men say that they are “optimistic this morning,” because they have breakfasted well; or that they are “pessimistic,” there being a fall in stocks. It crops out in theology, in such arguments as that God cannot be omnipotent, since he permits earthquakes and volcanoes, floods, droughts, and tempests. It unhappily dominates the thought even of many sincere reformers and pioneers, who believe that the salvation of humanity means the elimination of discomforts from life. They fancy that because evil makes us uncomfortable, good is to be pursued through steam-heat, electricity, and furniture. Good and evil are for them external facts, not inward conditions.

The reason that this conception of evil as something external and fatal is so crude and unsatisfactory is that it entirely fails to take account of a vital element in our experience of bad things, — namely, of our mental attitude toward them, our spiritual reaction upon them. We instinctively feel that no evil worthy of the name is defined simply by stating an event, a fact, an outward condition. To that external factor in it we must add the internal factor of our behavior toward it. There is no such thing as an abstract evil, floating in a vacuum like some lost meteorite in the interplanetary spaces. Any evil is evil only in relation to some consciousness. And if it be thus related to some consciousness, then it will be in turn reacted upon by that consciousness. Nothing, in short, has any effect upon us, or is in any sense real to us, until, as we may say, it is assimilated; and the form in which we assimilate it is determined not more by it than by ourselves. It is a fact of the most momentous importance that we contribute to our own lives, moment by moment and with inevitable constancy, an ingredient which is always the same, and which enters into instant chemical combination with everything that befalls us. This ingredient is the peculiar quality of our character or genius. As it is in the nature of man to transform certain kinds of vibrations of ether, from whatever source they reach him, into light, and certain kinds of airvibrations into sound, so it is in his nature to turn all his experience to the uses of character. Or again, as nitric acid, brought into contact with iron, copper, zinc, or lead, makes in turn nitrate of iron, nitrate of copper, nitrate of zinc, or nitrate of lead, — but always a nitrate,— so the character of a man, brought into contact with events, treats them all as spiritual opportunities. If, then, we would gain more than a superficial conception of evil, we must insist on perceiving evils in their relation to the ideal purposes our characters create. These purposes, constantly held, never in the finite world fulfilled, run through our lives as melodies run through music. Changeless, perennial, they pierce and penetrate the kaleidoscopic flux of events as melodies pierce and penetrate the fabric of harmonies in which they are embodied. They alone persist, they alone stamp life, teeming and inchoate as it is, with one dominant character, one unchanging value and significance. Nothing can befall a man that he cannot in some degree relate to his ideals. The direst temptation is a means of holiness; the utmost frailty is a condition of strength; loss, loneliness, and bereavement are the schools of loyalty; and failures are the stages in success.

Nor need we fear that this analysis of the relation of ideals to events, by which we have been led from the conception of external evil to that of ethical evil, just as by analyzing the relations of melody and harmony we were led from the conception of discord to that of dissonance, is a mere intellectual feat, a device of ingenuity, without real value as a revelation of truth. To convince ourselves of its validity we need only note that it is actually our ideal purposes themselves which introduce into our world most of the evils we experience. So close and causal is the relation. By merely surrendering the ideals, we could generally evade the evils. Temptation (to take the examples just used) exists for us only so long as we desire holiness; we should be unaware of our weakness did we not long for strength; only the lover can experience loneliness; and we can fail only so long as we try to succeed. The animals, as Walt Whitman keenly says, are neither respectable nor unhappy; for having no ideals, they cannot fall short. “The conscious ills which beset our fortune,” writes Professor Royce, “are in a large measure due to the very magnitude and ideality of our undertakings themselves, to the very loftiness of our purposes, and even to the very presence of our active control over our deeds. For all these more ideal aspects of our consciousness mean that we set our standard high, and strive beyond the present more ardently. And in such cases our ideals actually imply our present dissatisfaction, and so contribute to our consciousness of temporal ill.” It is true, then, in a very real sense, that our ideal aims not only react to modify the nature of evils, but actually produce some of the most significant evils we experience. Even so, we have seen, the melodies in a piece of music not only influence our attitude toward the dissonances they encounter in their progress, but actually create these dissonances by following out their chosen paths. They must, as melodies, be significant, interesting, thematic; and that involves many momentary complexities of harmony. Our ideals, in their turn, make high demands upon us, — demands which often bring us into painful conflict with our environment. Ideals, then, create and justify the sort of evil we have called ethical, just as melodies create and justify dissonance.

Finally, the ethical evil thus created and justified by ideal aims reacts to give these aims an immensely increased vitality. And here we touch at last upon a peculiarity of ethical as opposed to external evil, which has, more strikingly than any other, suggested the analogy with musical dissonance. Dissonance, we saw, was a harshness or complexity, resulting from the carrying out of melodic purposes, which in turn actually stimulated and vitalized those purposes. Similarly, are not ethical evils those birth pangs of the spirit which, primarily caused by the conflict between our ideal aims and our circumstances, end by impelling us all the more irresistibly along our path, filling us with a new and immeasurable vitality ? Do not the very obstacles to our progress develop in us a strength by which we not only overleap them, but are prompted to seek worthier goals ? Is not our very ignorance of the final issues of life, pathetic as it is from one point of view, the condition of a courage which could not be so noble if it fought no fears ? Does not the dignity of our faith depend on the limitation of our knowledge ? The more we study the facts of our inner life, the more convinced we must become that our misfortunes and our sufferings, be they only clearly understood and firmly handled, are the sources of new moral momentum in us; that they initiate and foster our ideal aims, unfolding before us like a panorama new consummations and fulfillments.

Are there then, nevertheless, no such things as blind and fatal evils, unamenable to character, wholly stubborn to ideal uses? Not absolutely, perhaps; but relatively there surely are, as we know to our sorrow. We constantly do encounter evils we cannot comprehend, evils which for us are opaque, diabolic, and disastrous. To trace the relation of such evils to spiritual life would mean to delve deeply in the researches of metaphysics, to define types of consciousness both higher and lower than the human, and to see whether what is for us fatal and terrible may not be for these other minds necessary and right. But this we cannot attempt. We can here only suggest that, harsh as much of our experience irremediably is, we are ever, with surprised delight, discovering in it, now here and now there, supposed discords that on further acquaintance turn out to be dissonances. Who can tell where the process will end ? So long as our evil remains external it is, alas, an accident, a chaos, a prank of destiny; but once let it be perceived as in a relation to our inner purposes, even if only in the relation of an enemy that may be conquered, and it is won over, reclaimed, domesticated. Our one skill, then, in life as in art, is the skill to perceive; and the great business of our lives is the training of perception. The one irremediable misfortune is to be blind; the one ever serviceable technique is insight.

If, therefore, our conceptions of dissonance and of evil depend in so large a measure on our intelligence, on our power to penetrate their tissue and hold clearly in mind the aims which justify them, should we not expect these conceptions to change from age to age and from individual to individual, reflecting accurately various stages of training and faculty ? The answer is definite enough on the musical side, if somewhat problematic on the ethical. Nothing in musical history is more surprising than the constant unfolding of the power to discriminate dissonance from discord. When men first combined tones together they could tolerate hardly any interval harsher than the octave, the fifth, and the fourth. Gradually the thirds and sixths were introduced, but with many strict regulations and conditions. Even in Mozart’s time the third was often omitted from the final chord of a composition, as too opposed to the sense of restfulness desired; and Bach generally ends his fugues written in minor keys, not with the minor third, but with the less dissonant major interval. Beethoven horrified his contemporaries by the harsh combinations he delighted in, and Schumann and Wagner have accustomed our ears to sounds that would have seemed quite intolerable to Palestrina, if not even to Haydn. All this means that as the musical perceptions of men gradually became sharpened they learned to hold clearly in mind combinations of tone constantly more complex, and to perceive their relations and functions so clearly that they could tolerate greater and greater momentary harshness, so long as it was felt as necessary to melodic progress, and useful to melodic vitality. In our own day the development is more rapid than ever, and no man can say where it will stop.

When we turn to the history of ethics the analogous process is harder to trace. Certainly, however, the lesson taught by the greatest moralists, from Marcus Aurelius down to Maeterlinck, is that happiness springs not from pleasure or the avoidance of discomfort, but from self-mastery and the unfolding of the inner powers. There are still, and probably always will be, those who can conceive human progress only as a gain in material welfare; but, on the whole, the consensus of feeling seems to be more and more moving toward a moral or idealistic interpretation of life, and men are slowly learning that evil is to be controlled and spiritualized rather than abolished, and that it is possible to be happy without being comfortable.