I spent the last few months examining dissonance in music. I cataloged hundreds of harmonies that express bliss, anger, frustration, pain, or indifference. I drew countless diagrams and made a type of Mendeleev’s periodic table to categorize all possible sonorities of pentachords, hexachords, and septachords, all color-coded in a high-tech Excel spreadsheet. Among them the cliché chords of centuries past and the modern ones, used by prominent contemporary composers. I can now sort the chords based on the dissonance and consonance levels, or whatever combinations and characteristics I fancy at the moment. Most of these concepts are nuts and bolts of post-tonal music theory taught at the college level, but still beyond, there is a gateway into the world of geometry and elegant symmetry ready to reveal itself to an inquisitive observer.
I like diagraming the interval vectors of complex chords to examine the marvelous constellations of sonic flavors. I like playing with my index cards spelling out all the black and white keys of the piano and organizing them in new sequences. These exercises help me ease into composing a new piece and challenge me to try new ideas. But what began as a desire to merely organize my compositional toolbox, quickly became an obsession that evoked a kind of intellectual and existential rapture in finding hidden symmetries and secret patterns. I began to believe that my persistence would lead to a discovery of a unifying principle that might enlighten my composition process.
The 12 tones of the chromatic scale, like 12 months of the year, like 12 hours on the clock face, like 12 signs of the zodiac, like 12 hues on the color wheel, the keys to the entire musical universe, arrange themselves in shapes not unlike snowflakes under a microscope or sacred geometrical figures. The scales, the intervals, the chords, the convoluted ones and the pedestrian, barely understood, closely guarding their secrets but enticing and promising an encounter with the Divine after just one more calculation of the ratios.
©2023 Dosia McKay
