The Listening Service Extra 3 of 12 - Dissonance

Tom explores what Schoenberg meant by the dissonance and how he broke free from tonality in his music.

‘Contemporary music has taken advantage of my adventurous use of dissonances. Let us not forget that I came to that gradually, as a result of a convincing development, which enabled me to establish the law of the emancipation of the dissonance, which I mentioned before already, according to which the comprehensibility of the dissonance is considered tantamount to the comprehensibility of the consonance. I do not say the dissonance is the same as the consonance. I say the comprehensibility of both is tantamount. Thus, dissonances need not be a spicy addition to dull sounds. They are natural and logic substantiation of an organism. And this organism lives as vitally on its phrases, rhythms, motives and also melodies, as ever before.' - Arnold Schoenberg 1949

Archive audio and photos with kind permission of Arnold Schönberg Center, Wien