Deceiving Dissonances

Pianos are dissonance amplifiers. Period. This is something that took me years to actually fully realize as I thought that simply a dissonance is a dissonance is a dissonance. But they are not as everybody who compares for instance dissonant sounds in a choir with the same dissonant sounds on a piano will quickly realize.

The piano is an instrument which generates a lot of higher harmonics, particularly when playing it loudly. The interaction between many high harmonics are what makes a sound subjectively dissonant and the more of these higher harmonics are present, the more dissonant a dissonant interval or chord will sound to our ear. Coming back to the choir mentioned above which when sung softly is a sound very close to sine waves, any dissonance will be subjectively milder due to the lack of the clashing higher harmonics.

Another factor is textural difference. If I place a dissonance between two different textures, our brain will process them more as two different entities rather than their interaction in between, which puts the focus away from the actual dissonance.

While this all seems like a relatively minor realization, its implication on writing music is huge. When I started learning composition and orchestration, I of course (as many composers) started out my writing on a piano, because that was my first instrument, I sketched themes, harmonic progressions etc. on it. And the tendency of the piano to highlight dissonances really made me shy away from them. Most of my pieces from these times knew 2 harmonic worlds: minor and major triads with rare occurances of dissonance or "I'm banging every key on the keyboard because: cluster!" for "horror music". 

Only when I started to reverse engineer orchestral pieces and studied score sheets, I stumbled across chords and voicings that sounded relatively relaxed in the recording but were spicy dissonances when I played them on the piano. This kind of shook my world as I felt like I couldn't trust the piano when I wanted to write for orchestra and not being far enough in my development of my inner ear to imagine a chord or harmony in different orchestral instruments I felt like I was writing music "blindly".

The tolerance for dissonance in an orchestra is (depending on orchestration of course) considerably higher and to prove my point on what I'm talking about let's take a small snippet from ANAKIN'S THEME:

Listen to this passage here (starting at 0:15) and notice how this all flows harmonically very nicely without the feeling of a harsh subjective dissonance. Now try playing the downbeat of bar 9 on a piano. There is a minor ninth between e (cello) and f (vln1/vln2). There is a major 7 between e (cello) and eb (vlas, vln2) so effectively we have 3 chromatic notes in that voicing: eb, e and f. Closely observe how the subjective dissonance when playing this on a piano is so much higher than when hearing the same voicing in the strings. In the recording, we hear this as a nice and rich harmony that rubs a little, on the piano it sounds really harsh.

This is a fundamentally important realisation that took me a long time to fully make use of. I always felt that my music was harmonically flat compared to what I heard in the scores but shied away from the dissonances as my piano was telling me they were too harsh. It took a while until I developed a clear knowledge of what  and how it would sound differently compared to what I heard from the piano. Now you all probably know my perspective on the musical language of modern scoring vs. the tradition of the grand masters of film scoring and one thing that I personally feel is that this realisation from above has also not transpired through to all composers working in the field. In fact, this is one of the biggest problems I have with "modern scoring" - the harmonic flatness. Major triads, minor triads, a few effects to create tension, drones, power chords, clusters. That's about as much as you get on the harmonic side in modern scoring with only rare exceptions.

And, I know that some will disagree and I might make enemies with that, but this phenomenon unfortunately also extends to the "orchestral stars" of the younger generations of scoring like for instance John Powell. I'm only picking him here, because we have a direct comparison when looking at the Star Wars franchise. While his score for Solo is very detailled and with lots of orchestral colour and a lot of people love it and some even say it is better than the last three Williams Star Wars scores, there is no denying that it is harmonically considerably more flat than what Williams has written.

There is a really nice relatively unknown (because nerdy) YT channel by Dominic Sewell where he recently seems to be deeply (sometimes over-)analyzing Williams cues from THE PHANTOM MENACE, like for example this one. Comparatively we have for instance this action cue from Solo, that Powell himself posted on his YT channel. And without wanting to put any personal judgement and preference into this, from a purely objective standpoint regarding harmonic complexity, we can safely say that the Powell example is harmonically considerably more flat compared to the Williams example and this observation can be applied to both scores entirely. I don't want to make any judgement about which of these approaches is "better" as this is highly subjective and as I said some people prefer the Powell approach over the Williams approach so this is not the discussion here. However, coming back to the beginning, looking at all the relatively strong dissonances in the Williams piece, they defitnitely do not reach the same harshness as if you played this reduction on a piano.

The bottom line here should be that the same dissonances can sound very different depending on which instrument/orchestration you chose. In general we can say that dissonances on a piano are often subjectively consideribly harsher than the same dissonances in an orchestra. In orchestral writing, I personally feel that the right choice of dissonances add massively to the harmonic and also emotional richness of the music. Even in "calm" pieces like Anakin's Theme, dissonances that seem harsh on the piano can create a spectacular richness in the orchestra. So while this has a lot to do with personal and professional growth as a composer to get the hang of this, I feel that learning composers should consciously be aware of this phenomenon and actively embrace dissonances in their writing.