Harmony: functional and dysfunctional

by Professor Wilfrid Mellers

Part I: The Beethovenian Crisis (A)

In the beginning music was rhythm, or melody, which involved rhythm too, since it existed in time. The intervallic disposition of these melodies tended to be pentatonic, since such five-note figurations are, for acoustical reasons, the easiest to sing: as we may observe in the spontaneous cantillations of children, at almost any time or place. When, in 'primitive' societies, in the great oriental cultures, and in Europe's Middle Ages, more than one melodic line is sung or piped simultaneously, this is either what came to be called organum - the duplication of a tune a fourth above or a fifth below the main pitch, the absolute consonances of fourth and fifth being barely distinguishable from unisons or octaves: or in heterophony, whereby the same melody is sung or played at different pitches in slightly, often fortuitously, different versions. Neither of these techniques entails a departure from the principles of monody, or music in a single line.

William Byrd (1543-1623)

Example 1: Agnus Dei
(Mass in five voices)

Agnus Dei
qui tollis peccata mundi,
miserere nobis.

Agnus Dei
qui tollis peccata mundi,
miserere nobis.

Agnus Dei
qui tollis peccata mundi,
dona nobis pacem.

The third dimension of European music, that of harmony (whereby tones of different pitch combine to create variously disturbing alternations of vibration-ratios), seems to have been a purely 'Western' phenomenon. Both primitive societies and oriental cultures tried to ignore time: whereas our Western consciousness, proud of being human, ticked off the emotional and intellectual vagaries of passing moments, gradually equating alternations of harmonic tension with our awareness of our all-to-mortal selves. Thus post-Renaissance ecclesiastical polyphony, as distinct from pre-Renaissance polyphony, allows personal expressivity to intrude into what had been an act of worship. It is no accident that some of the earliest manifestations of harmony in 'our' sense should be chronologically coincident with Shakespeare, the highest point in our consciousness of selfhood: as we may hear in the 'Shakespearean' pathos of the chains of suspended dissonances in the Agnus Dei of Byrd's five-voiced Mass, appealing - O miserere nobis - for God's mercy on us, miserable offenders though we be.

From there it is only a step to the overtly dramatic rhetoric of a madrigal of Italian Monteverdi, and from thence to the birth of opera, an imitation, if also a sublimation, of human actions. Over the succeeding eras, especially the classical baroque age of Handel and Bach, the third dimension of harmony became an architectural and mensural principle of musical form, allied with what was (erroneously) believed to be a scientific theory of tonality. The Laws of harmony and tonality became guides to social evolution, and any disturbance of them reflected an imbalance between the public and private life which it was the duty of civilization to counter and correct. Such chromatic or modulatory vagaries as crept into the sturdy edifice were 'colourings' that, however potent, were incidental.

In the second half of the 18th century dichotomy between the private and the public life became the heart of the sonata principle which, like civilization itself, was 'open' and in process, as compared with the 'closed' , time-measured structures of the classical baroque. The central role of sonata form in European music derives from the fact that in it alternations of degrees of consonance and dissonance, and movement towards or away from a tonal centre, transformed musical forms into a spiritual pilgrimage, seeking resolution of the contradictions inherent in being human - even if a man-monarch pretending to be God - rather than divine.

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