Disclaimer: This essay was planned and written in collaboration with Gemini Pro 2.5.
A common way to understand the aesthetic power of music is as fundamentally about tension and release. Resolution and quietude form a base from which tension and dissonance act as narrative excursions that must eventually be brought back home. The aesthetic focus is the journey itself—the creation and satisfaction of expectation.
Surprise is key to the aesthetic power of this dominant sonority too. Surprise is created through the manipulation of narrative expectation: when music sets up a strong pull towards a specific harmonic destination—a musical “home”—the most powerful surprises are plot twists. A composer can build anticipation for a resolution and then provide a different, unexpected one, delay the expected arrival, or withhold it altogether. The effect is a dramatic subversion of the story being told. The pleasure is in having your expectations cleverly thwarted.
But there is much music for which this model is an ill-fit—though attempts continue to be made to shoehorn it in. One of these different sonorities establishes a baseline not of resolution or “home”, but of ambiguous symmetry, a structure built from repeating, equivalent parts which prevents any single element from asserting itself as a necessary center or goal. This non-directional field of sound is then punctuated by moments of interest—dissonance, yes, but also unexpected resolutions, rhythmic junctures or even silence. This mode of listening shifts the focus from “where are we going?” to “what is happening now?” A space for surprise, novelty, and play is created—emotional evocation without narrative.
The fugues of Bach are an example. A dense, stable weave is created from the constant repetition and manipulation of a single melodic subject. Momentary dissonances and resolutions bring interest, satisfaction and even expectation for the next one, and the overall effect is not that of a singular narrative arc but of a complex, self-sustaining architecture.
Arnold Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method also participates in this alternative sonority. By systematically cycling through all twelve pitches to prevent the emergence of a tonal centre, he establishes a new kind of baseline: a saturated harmonic world where the listener is invited not to await a resolution that will never arrive, but to perceive the shifting relationships within a constant system.
Moving forward through history we come to another example, that of the minimalist works of Philip Glass. This is a music built on additive processes and repetitive cells, creating a pulsating, hypnotic stasis. The interest here works slightly differently, though the effect is the same: instead of punctuations in a static or cyclical background the musical events change the background itself. Still, the opposition of consonance and dissonance is denied, the aesthetic power derived from playful surprise and intrigue.
The last example I’ll bring up here is the jazz and blues tradition of solo improvisation within a group. The rhythm section’s steady pulse—the walking bass line, the ride cymbal’s repeating pattern—and the cyclical harmony of a song’s changes create a continuous, stable field. This underlying repetition provides the foundation for a string of personal and inventive gestures by the soloist, a playful exploration of the underlying structure and an expression of their individuality. The aesthetic pleasure comes from the interplay between the constant and the variable, the system and the individual voice that speaks through it.
In each of these examples, a continuous, balanced system serves as the baseline. An event, whether that be a subtle change in texture, an unprepared dissonance or momentary resolution, does not serve to subvert a narrative but instead inflects the continuous present. A moment of heightened awareness arises from the pattern, highlighting the nature of the pattern itself.
This mode of listening creates a fundamentally playful engagement. We’re not led by the hand through a well crafted story but invited to just perceive, to delight in the sensory detail of the moment as it unfolds. This sonority does not ask for our narrative interpretation; it asks for our attention.