Orchestral Voicings Part 10: Managing Dissonances (feat. Rite of Spring)

In a previous parts of this series, I was writing about about the intervallic approach to chord voicings, structuring them based on the consonance or dissonance degree of the inherent intervals. Through that strategy you can control the impression and also emotional impact of a chord quite specifically and I'd like to dive a bit deeper into this in this part. 

I need to write a little longer exposition into this topic than I usually do but I feel that here it definitely is appropriate.

A big part in gaining proper control over the harmony of your composition is to get a conceptual idea about what dissonance is. I remember that when I was getting into composing music my understanding of dissonance was that in order to create it you just add a lot of random notes until it sounds "bad". This also reflects in my earlier "dissonant" compositions, where my understanding was to just create an impenetrable wall of sound by just stacking clusters on top of each other.

It took me several years until I learned to appreciate the enormous musical power you can create with proper dissonances and it also took quite some time until I figured out the concept that in order to create a satisfying resolution in music, you need to create tension before that.

The essential concept to grasp is that well constructed dissonances should remain transparent and structured. There rarely is a space where mindlessly banging random notes on a piano should be the way to go when you approach this.

One orchestral work that changed the way how I looked at dissonance (and which definitely had the same influence on many composers of the 20ths century) was Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. While it overwhelmed me when I heard it the first time at the age of around 13 and I simply couldn't quite grasp the sheer creative power that it had, it dawned on me that there must be something to this piece. It actually took several listening attempts and years until in my early 20s until I started to realize what this piece was. 

Why am I telling this story? Because it takes time and experience to fully grasp sounds that would commonly be considered "dissonant". So if at your current state you feel like "Yeah, I know Rite of Spring, it's not my cup of tea, just too harsh to listen to, I don't get why everybody is buzzing about it", don't worry. The more experience you gather, the more you will start to appreciate and understand structures that are beyond common triadic harmony.

And this is where we take a turn back to voicings as these things are exactly the central elements I want to cover in this part. 

This part will be a little different than the parts until now as I will focus exclusively on a few select voicings from Rite of Springs. I will not dive into orchestration just yet as this will follow in later parts but we will have a look just at the voicings.

If you are not familiar with the work, give it a listen at  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rP42C-4zL3w 

You possibly might feel overwhelmed by the music which is completely fine but you get bonus points if you soldier through anyway :)

We all might agree that this piece generally has a high degree of dissonance all the way through with hardly any moments of pure relaxation. Yet it manages extremely well to build moments of tension buildup and moments of resolution. This is not entirely based on the harmonic approach but also on other factors like rhythm, orchestration, dynamics etc. which I would count into something that we could call "harmonic set-up". This means that in spite of constant harmonic instability, there are other factors in the music that help our perception to structure and understand what is going on.

I could probably write endless essays about this piece looking at it from many different angles and it is quite tricky to just extract the factor of voicings from it but let's nevertheless try to start there.

A common concept of Stravinsky's approach to harmony here is to stack different rather simple chords on top of each other. Music theory has several names for this approach from bitonality to polychords. There are essential benefits to creating dissonances through this concept:

1. The voicings will maintain a relative transparency. Stacking individual clearly perceivable structures on top of each other will still give our ear the chance to "process" them better than just a "wall of sound".

2. It will be much easier for the players to find their role. Intonating in clearly understandable structures will create much better results than musicians trying to find a pitch in a hyper complex interval stack.

Let's get started with one of the most well known passages:

https://youtu.be/rP42C-4zL3w?t=209

For the sake of understandability let's renotate it slightly:

https://soundcloud.com/robin-hoffmann/rite-of-spring-voicing-1/s-KaOt5WX8Ker

As you can see, there is a Eb7 chord stacked on top of a Emajor triad. While the structures in themselves are very stable, the interaction of intervals between these two creates some harsh dissonances, mainly a lot of major sevenths (E-Eb, G#-G, B-Bb). Also note how what we learned as Low Interval Limits is completely ignored with the lower triad for the sake of creating a dark quality.

There are two more things to take from this:

1. The forceful repetition of this chord makes it more into a rhythmic event than an actual voicing, yet we can hear the harmonic structure of it. It's not just a "wall" but remains clear and transparent in a way that if you tried to sit down by the piano and take that voicing down by ear, it would be pretty easy to get hold of what structure it is. 

2. The deceiving dissonance of the piano. If you compare the piano audio demo with the actual recording you will notice that the real orchestra sounds way more structured and way less dissonant than the piano. This is a common problem which can only be solved with having a lot of experiencein writing for orchestra. The rich harmonic structure of the piano will make dissonances sharper than for instance the more homogenous sound of the strings. Even more extreme are the differences between Piano and Choir where things that sound like extremely harsh dissonances on the Piano feel completely "harmless" with choir.

The next voicing is more of a passage as it becomes the central element of this part:

https://youtu.be/rP42C-4zL3w?t=607

It is that extremely dissonant voicing that appears at rehearsal mark 53. In order to understand where this is coming from we need to have a look at the entire passage starting earlier:

https://youtu.be/rP42C-4zL3w?t=514

This whole passage establishes a certain structure that keeps reappearing which after a while of staying on a plateu suddenly bursts into this full forced rather painful tutti chord.

The interesting part is that the preparation of the constantly reappearing structure before makes the "explosion" rather understandable in spite of its harsh structure. Stravinsky more or less prepares us carefully and makes it possible for us to stay with him in spite of this radical burst of dissonance.

Compare the two voicings:

https://soundcloud.com/robin-hoffmann/rite-of-spring-voicing-2/s-xhC6tpXduvy

I left out the ascending bass line which of course also creates a lot of structure for the listener and focused on the first two beats of each bar.

There are several interesting things to observe here:

1. The "tame" version is a very straight forward Ebm(add9) voicing while the tutti version more or less shifts into a tritonality of an Eb5 Pedal and a combination of a Bm and Bb triad in the higher registers. Again the Bm/Bb creates a lot of dissonant intervals.

2. The contrast between the super resonant Eb5 pedal and the harsh upper voicing is increased by staggering their entrance. If he put both on the downbeat it would create way more harmonic disorientation.

Yet, we don't struggle much of perceiving this structure in a musical context. We hear that it is a development of the previous structure and can relate to it in spite of the heightened degree of intervallic dissonance. This is a wonderful example of how to introduce dissonance and still keep a way for the listener to access it.

The next example is my absolute favourite voicing from this piece:

https://youtu.be/rP42C-4zL3w?t=1019 (Rehearsal Mark 82)

He uses a similar strategy as with the voicing before by repeating it and building it up to the bigger form but this particular voicing for me personally has an incredible emotional force, it feels to me like a powerful yet devastated sigh.

Again, this needs context to understand so start listening here:

https://youtu.be/rP42C-4zL3w?t=953

(Notice the clear inspiration that Williams took in Star Wars from this very opening:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PX945NlXkEA )

https://soundcloud.com/robin-hoffmann/rite-of-spring-voicing-3/s-blXTxngekkb

Again we have two clear triads of Dm and Ebm stacked on top (or partially within) each other which again creates a high degree of dissonance between the triads while maintaining a clear structure. Observe how exactly this harmonic situation is already established right from the beginning of this movement where you can see the Dm triad in the sustaining horns while the woodwinds eighths pattern outline a D#m .

Those three examples are just a fraction of what can be discovered in this work. The bottom line for your own voicing strategies here should be to experiment with stacking triads and creating dissonance by that. 

Alternatively creating dissonance by carefully stacking intervals until the desired degree is reached is of course another valid approach. However the approach by Stravinsky creates a stronger tonality with the listener and usually is more accessible than a voicing structure that remains completely independet of any "tonal cells".