Musician, Heal Thyself

A somewhat more exact account of music's emotional effects than music's much-reputed power to soothe the human breast was attempted last week in the American Journal of Psychiatry by lanky, bearded Dr. Howard Hanson, dean of Rochester's Eastman School of Music. Dr. Hanson's conclusions pointed to possible uses of music in controlling emotion, and perhaps to a new wrinkle in esthetic theory. His main conclusion:

A pleasing vitamin in music is consonance, as in such agreeable harmonies as the standard Do Mi Sol Do. When composers wish to ennoble, invigorate or inspire their listeners (as for example in the opening bars of the Star-Spangled Banner) they depend heavily on consonances. An upsetting virus in music is dissonance, a combination of sounds full of sonorous tension which may produce anything from vague impatience to acute aural distress. When composers wish to disturb their listeners, make them weep, sigh or foam at the mouth, they do it with dissonances.*

Practically all the music of Western civilization consists of consonances variously interspersed with dissonances. But throughout musical history the dissonances have shown a tendency to crowd the consonances out. In the 16th Century Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, who composed the greatest of all Catholic liturgical music, expressed himself almost entirely in consonances. But 18th-Century Johann Sebastian Bach, a product of the more individualistic Protestant Reformation, used dissonances liberally, especially in his impassioned, emotional moments. And 19th-Century Richard Wagner, whose individualism bordered on egomania, laid dissonances on with a trowel.

Playing variations on this theme, Dr. Hanson implied connections between dissonance and passion, sex, revolutionary ardor and crime. Thus when Wagner, in the Lohengrin Prelude, wished to evoke virginal purity, he used far fewer dissonances than in the Tannhduser Bacchanale. Palestrina's contemporary, Don Carlo Gesualdo, a 16th-Century rapscallion who ended by hacking his wife to pieces with a knife, used far more dissonances than pious Palestrina.

The widespread use of dissonance in jazz worries Dr. Hanson. Said he: "I hesitate to think of what the effect of music upon the next generation will be if the present school of 'hot jazz' continues to develop unabated. It should provide an increasing number of patients for [psychiatric] . . . hospitals, and it is, therefore, only poetic justice that musical therapeutics should develop at least to the point where music serves as an antidote for itself."

* Consonance and dissonance (whose technical explanation is lengthy) are not to be confused with what laymen generally refer to as "harmony" and "discord." The combinations ordinarily called "harmony" include both consonances and dissonances.

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