Page 193 - ESSENTIAL LISTENING TO MUSIC

allowing for the rich, sensuous sounds we associate with Romantic music. Example 11.2 shows a passage with quick-changing chromatic chords found in a nocturne of Chopin discussed later in this chapter. The many sharps and flats signal the twisting chromatic movement.
Example 11.2 > chromatic harmony
Chromatic harmony opened up the tonal landscape, encouraging bold shifts between distant chords—a chord built on a scale with one flat might soon be fol- lowed by one with seven flats, for example. These striking harmonic juxtaposi- tions allowed composers to express a wider range of feeling. In Example 11.3, Chopin’s rich chords from the same nocturne are given and then reduced to their simplest forms.
Example 11.3A > bold harmonic shift
Example 11.3B > essential chords of harmony
F Major A Major A Minor E Major
Finally, nineteenth-century composers gave a “romantic feel” to music by means of temporary dissonance. Longing, pain, and suffering traditionally have been expressed in music by dissonance. All musical dissonance, according to the rules of composition, must resolve to consonance. In Romantic music the dissonance is passing: It sounds and then resolves (in later, Modernist music it need not resolve). The longer the painful dissonance, the greater the desire for resolution. A delay in the resolution intensifies feelings of anxiety, longing, and searching, all sentiments appropriate to music that deals with love or loneli- ness. The very end of Gustav Mahler’s orchestral song Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen (I Am Lost to the World) offers an exquisitely beautiful example of dissonance-consonance resolution. In Mahler’s song, first violins and English horn (low oboe) in turn hold a dissonant pitch (see arrows) that resolves down- ward (see asterisks), dying away (morendo) to the final consonant tonic.
LiSTeN TO . . . Example 11.2 online.
LiSTeN TO . . . Example 11.3A online.
LiSTeN TO . . . Example 11.3B online.
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