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Hear the sound of the cornet, flute, harp, sackbut, psaltery, dulcimer, and all kinds of musick.*
My son, the music theorist, would say that dissonance is a highly subjective matter, that notes colliding in sounds strange to the untrained ear are not necessarily mistakes of composition. The mellow resolutions of chords in the predictable harmony of the barbershop quartet are by no means the acme of musical art.
NPR's John Zech says, "All music was once new." He means that the dissonance the listener thinks he experiences when listening to music composed, say, in the 21st century may not -- probably will not -- sound like that of Bach, Mozart or Schubert much less Rachmaninoff. And so what? No doubt every composer was once booed by an audience hearing his work played for the first time. I believe that Georges Bizet's opera "Carmen" was at first greeted with audible complaint. Today, of course, the opera is considered a lovable old chestnut.
I have known members of the audience at Detroit Symphony Orchestra concerts to leave in disgust when such "new music" was programmed. Occasionally I have had the urge to do the same, but stayed because I did not want to appear to be a moron.
The lesson apparently is that one person's dissonance is another person's harmony and vice versa. David Nisbet Stewart, a good friend of mine, is a composer. He once told me that what I would call the canon law of composition is not at all a fixed thing.
I have tried to apply that idea to things in life that seem unpleasantly and occasionally alarmingly dissonant to me. I remember as if it were 20 minutes ago the day when as a boy I witnessed a hawk sweep down on a tiny baby rabbit and carry it off no doubt for a quite wonderful lunch. I cried and went into the house and asked my mother why God would permit such a thing to happen.
Thus ensued an explanation about how nature works, that rabbits are natural food for hawks as mice are natural food for cats. I am not sure today of that last proposition, but I accepted it then. It made me wonder, though, about the pot roast that was then simmering on the back burner of mother's stove. I knew enough to know that it was beef and that beef came from cattle, and that cattle had big brown eyes and seemed to be pretty passive creatures. As much as I loved my mother's pot roast, I was unable to eat any of it that night at dinner.
I see the incident at this remove as a dissonance in what I took to be a harmonious world.
Anthropologists have figured out that the knife evolved from roughly sharpened stones to keen blades through the ingenuity of our biological ancestors for the killing and butchering of animal flesh. How long before or soon thereafter did it occur to one possessing such an instrument that it could also be used for defense or aggression? Did the use of the knife for any purpose create a kind of dissonance in the natural order (if there is such a thing)? Was its use at any time an interruption in an intended harmony?
Yet to be introduced in this inquiry is the concept and term "human nature." By which is meant what? One hears it used to explain antisocial behavior, as in: "Well, that's just human nature." Really? Is robbing and harming another human being "human nature" or subhuman nature? Or is such a question an insult to dogs, cats and wolves? That takes us back to the hawk and the rabbit.
A sister-in-law recently called my attention to an entity known as "the deep web," a cyber invention that operates largely under the radar. Evidently it often spies on or manipulates other cyber properties that do not belong to the wraiths of the deep web that, it is said, are merely exercising their rights under net neutrality. A case of dissonance or perceived dissonance?
If I were again to teach the philosophy of religion, this discussion would eventually get to the concept of "theodicy," which, putting it briefly, takes up the question of why a benevolent deity presumably in charge of the universe would permit evil -- or what we might call the attack of dissonance upon intended harmony. Of course, that would require some explanation of why a deity would be presumed to be "benevolent" and by what standards. Also what evidence is there to support the idea that any such deity could be that much in charge, or would will to be, even if it could.
Should an inquirer find it unnecessary, undesirable or intellectually impossible to posit an involved and caring deity, the issue of dissonance versus harmony in the biosphere might be considered irrelevant. The proposition would be "what is is," leaving the various life forms on this planet or any planet to fend for themselves by developing strategies for survival with eyes firmly fixed on both prey and predators.
Such is the hard side of Darwin's "survival of the fittest." Survival in a more benign way requires adaptation to a particular environment or removal to another. Sometimes, though, staying and adapting or moving may involve confronting opposing forces beyond those that occur naturally, e.g. storms, floods, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and the like.
To return to the initial premise, maybe there is no such absolute as harmony or dissonance. Maybe there is just sound. Take it, because you can't leave it apart from rendering yourself deaf.
There is, though, an alternative approach. Humanists, who are generally allergic to faith-based belief -- preferring rationalized knowledge distilled from experience -- have come to believe that human beings have the capacity to rise above the predator-prey ways of nature and to craft civilization out of altruistic behavior, which, one might say, is not necessarily a given aspect of human nature.
Human nature, you say? One look at the Middle East, Afghanistan, the occupied territories of Israel-Palestine, the border between India and Pakistan, Putin's Russia, the streets of such places Ferguson, Missouri, and now Baltimore, and the norm is what Robert Burns called "man's inhumanity to man." Road rage and its sometimes murderous consequences, premeditated murder, assault, thievery and general disregard for the suffering of others are everyday events, and there is no visible end to it.
Yet the humanist holds out for what St. Paul called "a more excellent way."** And that way involves searching for, acknowledging, encouraging and promoting the best in the behavioral repertoire of every person -- with more than an occasional glance in the mirror. It involves what Hillel the Great is said to have declared in summing up Jewish law: That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. Strains of that same wisdom appear in the literature and traditions of virtually every known world religion.
It is a more excellent way. It is a way to effect the transformation of the term "human nature" from an explanatory excuse for behavior that creates what I insist is social dissonance into a descriptor of altruistic behavior that rewrites the score in way that produces something akin to a tuneful C, E, G-major triad with which even the most avant-garde composer can have no quarrel -- as long, I suppose, as he isn't required to use it in his next symphony or sonata.
* Daniel 3:5
** First Corinthians 12:31b
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