Turning Points In Music

Like all things Music is ever changing, making it one of the most diverse art forms we have on earth. Over the centuries music has been created by people who have built upon what they have seen and heard around them. Rarely do we see brand new ideas. Rather new ideas implemented into pre-existing forms. These new ideas some would say have led to a turning point in music, where a particular style or tone has been made acceptable and in many cases independent. In the early beginnings of music, we see the most valuable changes in harmony as we know it today. This is why I will be looking at the turning point of dissonance and consonance within early pieces of music and their composers. This turning point for me is absolutely the most vital thing
In practice, this broad definition can also include some instances of notes sounded one after the other. If the consecutively sounded notes call to mind the notes of a familiar chord, the ear will order them accordingly. “In such cases the ear perceives the harmony that would result if the notes had sounded together. In a narrower sense, harmony refers to the extensively developed system of chords and the rules that allow or forbid relations between chords that characterises Western music.” (Butterworth, 1999) The style of western harmony as practiced from c. 1650 to c. 1900 evolved from earlier musical practices of polyphony music; in several voices. It can also be related the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance and, ultimately, from the strictly melodic music of the Middle
The first instances were extremely simple, consisting of adding a voice that exactly paralleled the original melody at the interval of a fourth or fifth. (McNiel, 2015) As you would imagine this particular technique wouldn’t allow for continuous harmonies like forth, fifths and octaves. These intervals were considered consonances. Because of their conclusive and clear sonority like timbre; these intervals were generally used to put emphasis on particular words of phrases in the song or chant. Furthermore developing music to use parallel 3rds and 6ths as time proceeded. I have also found that early music also didn’t support the usage of the tri-tone, due to its dissonance, composers were often known to go to strenuous lengths, via musica ficta, to avoid using it. In the modern triadic harmonic system, however, the tri-tone became somewhat more accepted, as the standardisation of functional dissonance made its use in dominant chords desirable. (Butterworth,