David Bruce made a delightful video about the role of repetition in Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring.
While this piece is hair-raisingly dissonant, it’s also remarkably popular (by classical music standards, anyway.) David explains this fact by showing how repetition makes the previously inexplicable seem more meaningful and less threatening. A crunchy chord might be weird and scary when you hear it once, but when you hear it repeatedly, it becomes more familiar and acceptable.
I always enjoy David’s videos, but I do want to push back on one point. At 3:47, he says: “Dissonance repeated is the schtick of an awful lot of the most popular genres of twentieth century music.” He then cuts to Cory Wong of Vulfpeck playing a funk groove, and explains that “it’s based around the simplest kind of dissonant chord, the dominant seventh. That’s a chord that’s thought of as dissonant because it creates a tension that needs to resolve to the tonic.” David compares this to Stravinsky’s rhythmically repeated dissonances, and illustrates it with a nifty mashup of Cory Wong’s groove and the Rite.
The problem with David’s statement is that it’s only true in a particular stylistic context. In Western classical theory, dominant seventh chords create a tension that needs to resolve. However, in the context of funk and other blues-based music, tonic dominant seventh chords aren’t dissonant, they’re consonant. They don’t want to resolve anywhere because they’re resolved already. We need some new harmonic vocabulary to reflect the ways that blues harmony creates and resolves harmonic tension, because the European-descended tonal language is inaccurate.
As an example, consider “The Payback” by James Brown.
The intro groove has a straightforward Bb minor feeling.
At 0:37, however, the main groove kicks in, and it’s quite a bit more interesting: a Bbm13 chord that slides briefly up to Bm13, then back down to Bbm13.
Conventional music theory says that these chords are “dissonant” because of the tritone between the flat third and natural thirteenth. However, I think it’s incorrect to say that Bbm13 is dissonant in this context, because it implies that there’s a tension in need of resolving. In “The Payback,” Bbm13 is a resolved sound. The slide up to Bm13 introduces some dissonance, but that’s because of its metrical placement, not its harmonic content. To put it another way, the Bm13 chord is metrically dissonant, regardless of whatever harmonic dissonance it may also happen to possess.
In funk and other blues-based groove musics, you can make any chord function as the tonic through metrical placement, repetition and emphasis. The tonic will sound resolved regardless of the intervals in the chord. That doesn’t mean that every tonic chord sounds the same; a Bb minor triad sounds very different from a Bbm13. But to say that Bbm13 is more dissonant is to presume that we’re listening through the ears of an 18th century Western European. Instead of dissonance, I propose we use the term spiciness to describe the intervallic content of tonic chords in funk. Bbm13 is spicier than Bbm7, which is in turn spicier than a plain Bbm triad. But they are all equally consonant if they fill the metrical role of a tonic.
Let’s test my theory against the most dissonant funk I know of, Miles Davis’ music of the early 1970s. Listen to Pete Cosey’s insanely detuned 12-string guitar at about the five minute mark here:
I don’t know that the rhythm section groove makes the harmonies sound “consonant”, but it does apply some order to what would otherwise be total chaos. I don’t think I’d be able to even tolerate this music without the groove. With the groove, it’s still very challenging, but it makes enough sense that I’m willing to hang in there. This music is extremely spicy, but the sense of dissonance is caused as much by Pete Cosey’s rhythmic freedom as by his note and chord choices. If he was playing a more repetitive rhythm guitar pattern, his crazy tuning would probably start sounding consonant.
In class last week, I was playing various melodic ideas over the Funky Drummer break, and a student said, “Yes, but everything sounds good over the Funky Drummer.” She’s right! It “harmonizes” with everything. I found in grad school that I could make any canonical high modernist composition sound great by looping sections of it over the Funky Drummer.
So, to recap: David Bruce’s mashup of Cory Wong and Stravinsky doesn’t just sound good because it’s repetitive; it sounds good because it’s funky. Sheer repetition might help a musical idea to make more sense, but a groove is what really makes the loop sound good. Repetition legitimizes, but funk beautifies.
Update: this post is cited in a paper by Chris Jenkins about efforts to diversify classical music. It’s a good one!