Dissonance and Resolution

So after dinner tonight (peanut noodles), while waiting for the kids to finish so we could have the rare treat of a dessert (pumpkin pie), I sat down at the piano and started noodling around. I grew up with a piano, and have always loved the way they pull the home around themselves, becoming the center of family life, and while I don't really play (despite six years of lessons), I remember enough to pick out melodies and baselines. As I was sitting there, I started playing and realized it sounded like one of my ALL TIME favorite themes, the opening theme from Star Trek Voyager (also instantly bringing me back to late nights the summers I was 14 and 15). So I teased it out by ear, and then what I heard made me so excited I had to go get the girls and explain to them what I'd figured out.

The thing is, the melody and baseline of this theme (and honestly, if you don't know what I'm talking about, you should look it up and listen to it now, it is one of the most beautiful 2 minutes you will ever spend), the melody and baseline have this remarkable interplay where they are dissonant (read, side by side notes on a keyboard) and then resolved (notes that have a key in between them). I'm not a musical theorist nor have I ever had any training in such, but I explained to the girls (and they got it right away) how this interplay of dissonance and resolution tugs at you, making things feel jangly and then calm.

We got all excited and then went into the kitchen to have the pie, and while we were doing that I pulled up the theme on the computer, plugged in a speaker for more sound, and then we listened over and over to the orchestra playing this beautiful melody, and could hear it pull and resolve. The girls moved the island to the side so they could dance, and my wife practiced her figure skating moves while holding a chew toy for the puppy in one hand.

When listening to the orchestra version, I noticed something else, which is that the power of the piece comes in part from the tradeoff of different instruments taking turns playing the same melody. At first it is French horns, muted and far away, and then it is strings, haunting and lyrical. Finally, a blaze of trumpets soars through at the end, making your hand stand up.

I often lament that spooncarving is not a joint thing like making music. I wish there was some way we as a community could do something together that was more than the sum of our efforts, and I wonder what that might look like. I think it might have to do with these things, with the use of dissonance and resolution, and with taking turns playing with the same melodies.

I'm not sure how this could be created. I'm not even sure if it's possible. But if I can make people feel like how I feel when I listen to this theme, then I know I will have done it. And that's something that's worth pursuing.